Related papers: Thin, thick and dark discs in LCDM
I review current efforts to measure the mean density of dark matter near the Sun. This encodes valuable dynamical information about our Galaxy and is also of great importance for 'direct detection' dark matter experiments. I discuss…
In this work, two new axisymmetric models for the Galactic mass distribution are presented. Motivated by recent results, these two models include the contribution of a stellar thin disc and of a thick disc, as massive as the thin…
In local disk galaxies such as our Milky Way, older stars generally inhabit a thicker disk than their younger counterparts. Two competing models have attempted to explain this result: one in which stars first form in thin disks that…
We study the effect of dissipational gas physics on the vertical heating and thickening of disc galaxies during minor mergers. We produce a suite of minor merger simulations for Milky Way-like galaxies. This suite consists of collisionless…
Numerical simulations have revealed the presence of long-lived substructure in Cold Dark Matter (CDM) halos. These surviving cores of past merger and accretion events vastly outnumber the known satellites of the Milky Way. This finding has…
Galactic stellar haloes are largely composed of the remnants of galaxies accreted during the assembly of their host galaxies, and hence their properties reflect the mass spectrum and post-accretion evolution of their satellites. As the…
If the favored hierarchical cosmological model is correct, then the Milky Way system should have accreted ~100-200 luminous satellite galaxies in the past \~12 Gyr. We model this process using a hybrid semi-analytic plus N-body approach…
We employ an improved methodology to insert live stellar disks into high-resolution dark matter simulations of Milky Way sized halos, allowing us to investigate the fate of thin stellar disks in the tumultuous environment of cold dark…
We use FIRE simulations to study disk formation in z~0, Milky Way-mass galaxies, and conclude that a key ingredient for the formation of thin stellar disks is the ability for accreting gas to develop an aligned angular momentum distribution…
Many galaxies display warps, lopsided images, asymmetric rotation curves or other features which suggest that their immediate dynamical environment is neither static nor in equilibrium. In Cold Dark Matter (CDM) theories, such…
We have carried out a set of self-consistent N-body simulations to study the interaction between disc galaxies and merging satellites with the aim of determining the disc kinematical changes induced by such events. We explore a region of…
Stars and their kinematics provide one of the tools available for studies of the shapes of galaxies and their halos. In this review I focus on two specific applications: the shape of the Milky Way dark halo and the shape of the LMC disk.…
Any successful model of dark matter must explain the diversity of observed Milky Way (MW) satellite density profiles, from very dense ultrafaints to large, low density satellites such as Crater~II that appear to be larger their anticipated…
About two-thirds of present-day, large galaxies are spirals such as the Milky Way or Andromeda, but the way their thin rotating disks formed remains uncertain. Observations have revealed that half of their progenitors, six billion years…
We study the merger histories of galaxy dark matter halos using a high resolution LCDM N-body simulation. Our merger trees follow ~17,000 halos with masses M_0 = (10^11--10^13) Msun at z=0 and track accretion events involving objects as…
We investigate thin and thick stellar disc formation in Milky-Way-mass galaxies using twelve FIRE-2 cosmological zoom-in simulations. All simulated galaxies experience an early period of bursty star formation that transitions to a late-time…
Recent N-body simulations indicate that a thick disc of dark matter, co-rotating with the stellar disc, forms in a galactic halo after a merger at a redshift $z<2$. The existence of such a dark disc component in the Milky Way could affect…
We present a detailed analysis of the global and fine structure of four middle-mass disc galaxies obtained from simulations in a $\Lambda$CDM scenario. These objects have photometric D/T ratios in good agreement with those observed for…
We use numerical simulations to examine the substructure within galactic and cluster mass halos that form within a hierarchical universe. Clusters are easily reproduced with a steep mass spectrum of thousands of substructure clumps that…
We use high resolution N-Body/SPH simulations to study the hydrodynamical and gravitational interaction between the Large Magellanic Cloud and the Milky Way. We model the dark and hot extended halo components as well as the stellar/gaseous…