Related papers: How common is the Milky Way - satellite system ali…
The Milky Way (MW) is surrounded by numerous satellite objects: dwarf galaxies, globular clusters and streams of disrupted systems. Together, these form a vast polar structure (VPOS), a thin plane spreading to Galactocentric distances as…
A large fraction of the dwarf satellites orbiting the Andromeda galaxy are surprisingly aligned in a thin, extended and apparently kinematically coherent planar structure. Such a structure is not easily found in simulations based on the…
High resolution N-body simulations of galactic cold dark matter haloes indicate that we should expect to find a few satellite galaxies around the Milky Way whose haloes have a maximum circular velocity in excess of 40 kms. Yet, with the…
We investigate the properties of satellite galaxies formed in N-body/SPH simulations of galaxy formation in the $\Lambda$CDM cosmology. The simulations include the main physical effects thought to be important in galaxy formation and, in…
It has been thought for many years that the Milky Way is an overly large spiral galaxy. Using Cephied distances to 17 spiral galaxies we calculate the true linear diameters of those galaxies. These diameters are then compared to that of the…
The anisotropic distribution of satellites around the central galaxy of their host halo is well-documented. However the relative impact of baryons and dark matter in shaping this distribution is still debated. Using the simulation…
We investigate the properties of a galaxy similar to the Milky Way within the context of standard disk formation theory in a LCDM universe. Using the standard assumption that baryons conserve specific angular momentum when they collapse, we…
Many of the satellites of galactic-mass systems such as the Miky Way, Andromeda and Centaurus A show evidence of coherent motions to a larger extent than most of the systems predicted by the standard cosmological model. It is an open…
We compute the locations of satellite galaxies with respect to their hosts using the Lambda-CDM GIF simulation. If the major axes of the hosts' images are perfectly aligned with the major axes of their projected mass, the satellites are…
We examine the significance of a planar arrangement in the spatial distribution of the Milky Way's globular clusters (GCs). We find that, when separated on the basis of horizontal branch morphology and metallicity, the outer-most canonical…
We explore the hypothesis that a passing satellite or dark matter subhalo has excited coherent oscillations of the Milky Way's stellar disk in the direction perpendicular to the Galactic midplane. This work is motivated by recent…
The highly organised distribution of satellite galaxies surrounding the Milky Way is a serious challenge to the concordance cosmological model. Perhaps the only remaining solution, in this framework, is that the dwarf satellite galaxies…
We analyse the dynamical properties of substructures in a high-resolution dark matter simulation of the formation of a Milky Way-like halo in a $\Lambda$CDM cosmology. Our goal is to shed light on the dynamical peculiarities of the Milky…
Unveiling the 3D shape of the Milky Way's dark-matter halo is critical to understanding its formation history. We created an innovative dynamical model with minimal assumptions on the internal dynamical structures and accommodates a highly…
We introduce a new methodology to robustly determine the mass profile, as well as the overall distribution, of Local Group satellite galaxies. Specifically we employ a statistical multilevel modelling technique, Bayesian hierarchical…
We investigate the possibility that the recently discovered Hercules Milky Way satellite is in fact a stellar stream in formation, thereby explaining its very elongated shape with an axis ratio of 3 to 1. Under the assumption that Hercules…
Observations of low-mass satellite galaxies in the nearby Universe point towards a strong dichotomy in their star-forming properties relative to systems with similar mass in the field. Specifically, satellite galaxies are preferentially gas…
Planes of satellites are observed around many galaxies. However, these observations are still considered a point of tension for the $\Lambda$CDM paradigm. We use the fully hydrodynamical cosmological $\Lambda$CDM state-of-the-art simulation…
On small scales there have been a number of claims of discrepancies between the standard Cold Dark Matter (CDM) model and observations. The 'missing satellites problem' infamously describes the overabundance of subhalos from CDM simulations…
The distribution of shapes of galaxies' dark halos provides a basic test for models of galaxy formation. To-date, few dark halo shapes have been measured, and the results of different methods appear contradictory. Here, we add to the sample…