Probing Milky Way’s hot gas halo density distribution using the dispersion measure of pulsars

Abstract

A number of recent studies indicates a significant amount of ionized gas in a form of the hot gas halo around the Milky Way. The halo extends over the region of 100 kpc and may be acountable for the missing baryon mass. In this paper we calculate the contribution of the proposed halo to the dispersion measure (DM) of the pulsars. The Navarro, Frenk, and White (NFW), Maller and Bullock (MB), and Feldmann, Hooper, and Gnedin (FHG) density distibutions are considered for the gas halo. The data set includes pulsars with the distance known independently from the DM, e.g., pulsars in globular clusters, LMC, SMC and pulsars with known parallax. The results exclude the NFW distribution for the hot gas, while the more realisticMB and FHG models are compatible with the observed dispersion measure.