First spiral arm detection using dynamical mass measurements of the Milky Way disk

Abstract: We apply the vertical Jeans equation to the Milky Way disk, in order to study non-axisymmetric variations in the thin disk surface density. We divide the disk plane into area cells with a 100 pc grid spacing, and use four separate subsets of the Gaia DR3 stars, defined by cuts in absolute magnitude, reaching distances up to 3 kpc. The vertical Jeans equation is informed by the stellar number density field and the vertical velocity field; for the former, we use maps produced via Gaussian Process regression; for the latter, we use Bayesian Neural Network radial velocity predictions, allowing us to utilize the full power of the Gaia DR3 proper motion sample. For the first time, we find evidence of a spiral arm in the form of an over-density in the dynamically measured disk surface density, detected in all four data samples, which also agrees very well with the spiral arm as traced by stellar age and chemistry. We fit a simple spiral arm model to this feature, and infer a relative over-density of roughly 20 % and a width of roughly 400 pc. We also infer a thin disk surface density scale length of 3.3--4.2 kpc, when restricting the analysis to stars within a distance of 2 kpc.