Sofia Feltzing

Spiral galaxies, like the Milky Way, transform at some point in time into a rotationally supported system. Using an extant dataset consisting of 319,835 subgiants from LAMOST with precise ages from the literature, we determine, for the first time, the age when the Milky Way disk spins up, i.e., when the mean circular velocity changes from halo-like to disk-like. We find in concordance previous studies that report that the spin-up takes place for −1.25 < [Fe/H]< −0.9, and we can date this transition to a mean age of 12.1 ± 2.8 Gyr (median age 12.4 Gyr). We further study when the disk became rotationally supported, i.e., when the ordered, disky motion dominates over the random motions. We find that this happens for −1.25 < [Fe/H]< −1. The transition is very rapid in age. This gives support to the idea that the spin-up seen in this and other works genuinely traces the motion to a rotationally supported disk, which has not previously been shown. These transitions are traced by the high-α stars, while the low-α stars do not spin up but start directly at approximately the circular velocity seen for the Sun today. The low-α disk is rotationally supported with no transition period in [Fe/H] or in age.