Comments on "A huge reservoir of ionized gas around the Milky Way: accounting for the missing mass?" (2012 ApJL, 756, 8) and "The warm-hot gaseous halo of the Milky Way" (arXiv1211.3137)

Q. Daniel Wang, Yangsen Yao

Published 2012-11-20Version 1

The two papers referred to in the title, claiming the detection of a large-scale massive hot gaseous halo around the Galaxy, have generated a lot of confusion and unwarranted excitement (including public news coverage). However, the papers are seriously flawed in many aspects, including problematic analysis and assumptions, as well as mis-reading and mis-interpreting earlier studies, which are inconsistent with the claim. Here we show examples of such flaws.