Unifying the planar bar and the boxy bulge of the Milky Way

Abstract

For some time the Milky Way has been understood as a barred disk galaxy. Star count observations have provided evidence for two bars at apparently different orientations, the boxy bulge and a long planar bar. We report recent work in which we argued for a scenario where these observations can be reproduced with a single boxy bulge/bar: an evolved bar from the stellar disk and the corresponding boxy bulge generated from it through secular evolution and buckling instability. We calculated the star count distributions along different lines-of-sight for a simulated barred galaxy and an observer at the Sun position, and compared them with observations of red clump magnitude distributions. We found a good agreement between the model and the observations, even though the simulation has a single boxy bulge/bar. In this model, the different apparent orientations of the boxy bulge and planar bar are partially due to the volume effect and partially to the leading ends of the bar.