THE FIRST DISTANCE CONSTRAINT ON THE RENEGADE HIGH-VELOCITY CLOUD COMPLEX WD

Abstract

We present medium-resolution, near-ultraviolet Very Large Telescope/FLAMES observations of the star USNO-A0600-15865535. We adapt a standard method of stellar typing to our measurement of the shape of the Balmer epsilon absorption line to demonstrate that USNO-A0600-15865535 is a blue horizontal branch star, residing in the lower stellar halo at a distance of 4.4 kpc from the Sun. We measure the H & K lines of singly ionized calcium and find two isolated velocity components, one originating in the disk, and one associated with the high-velocity cloud complex WD. This detection demonstrated that complex WD is closer than ~4.4 kpc and is the first distance constraint on the +100 km s⁻¹ Galactic complex of clouds. We find that complex WD is not in corotation with the Galactic disk, which has been assumed for decades. We examine a number of scenarios and find that the most likely scenario is that complex WD was ejected from the solar neighborhood and is only a few kiloparsecs from the Sun.