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Bars are common galactic structures in the local universe that play animportant role in the secular evolution of galaxies, including the Milky Way.In particular, the velocity distribution of individual stars in our galaxy isuseful to shed light on stellar dynamics, and provides informationcomplementary to that inferred from the integrated light of external galaxies.However, since a wide variety of models reproduce the distribution of velocityand the velocity dispersion observed in the Milky Way, we look for signaturesof the bar on higher-order moments of the line-of-sight velocity ($V_{los}$)distribution. We make use of two different numerical simulations --one that hasdeveloped a bar and one that remains nearly axisymmetric-- to compare them withobservations in the latest APOGEE data release (SDSS DR14). This comparisonreveals three interesting structures that support the notion that the Milky Wayis a barred galaxy. A high skewness region found at positive longitudesconstrains the orientation angle of the bar, and is incompatible with theorientation of the bar at $\ell=0^\circ$ proposed in previous studies. We alsoanalyse the $V_{los}$ distributions in three regions, and introduce theHellinger distance to quantify the differences among them. Our results show astrong non-Gaussian distribution both in the data and in the barred model,confirming the qualitative conclusions drawn from the velocity maps. Incontrast to earlier work, we conclude it is possible to infer the presence ofthe bar from the kurtosis distribution.

Signatures of the Galactic bar on stellar kinematics unveiled by APOGEE