Kinematic Evidence for an Old Stellar Halo in the Large Magellanic Cloud
Abstract
The oldest and most metal-poor Milky Way stars form a kinematically hot halo, which motivates the two major formation scenarios for our galaxy: extended hierarchical accretion and rapid collapse. RR Lyrae stars are excellent tracers of old and metal-poor populations. We measure the kinematics of 43 RR Lyrae stars in the inner regions of the nearby Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) galaxy. The velocity dispersion, σtrue=5310 km/s, indicates that a kinematically hot metal-poor old halo also exists in the LMC. This suggests that our galaxy and smaller late-type galaxies like the LMC have similar early formation histories.
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