English

Detecting the disruption of dark-matter halos with stellar streams

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2016-03-30 v2 Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics High Energy Physics - Phenomenology

Abstract

Narrow stellar streams in the Milky Way halo are uniquely sensitive to dark-matter subhalos, but many of these subhalos may be tidally disrupted. I calculate the interaction between stellar and dark-matter streams using analytical and NN-body calculations, showing that disrupting objects can be detected as low-concentration subhalos. Through this effect, we can constrain the lumpiness of the halo as well as the orbit and present position of individual dark-matter streams. This will have profound implications for the formation of halos and for direct and indirect-detection dark-matter searches.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1512.00452,
  title  = {Detecting the disruption of dark-matter halos with stellar streams},
  author = {Jo Bovy},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1512.00452},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

PRL in press; 4 pages; all code available at https://github.com/jobovy/stream-stream