Related papers: Locating the orbits delineated by tidal streams
The Galaxy's stellar halo seems to be a tangle of disrupted systems that have been tidally stretched out into streams. Each stream approximately delineates an orbit in the Galactic force-field. In the first paper in this series we showed…
Recent years have seen the discovery of many tidal streams through the Galaxy. Relatively straightforward observations of a stream allow one to deduce three phase-space coordinates of an orbit. An algorithm is presented that reconstructs…
We present a brief history of Galactic astrophysics, and explain the origin of halo substructure in the Galaxy. We motivate our study of tidal streams by highlighting the tight constraints that analysis of the trajectories of tidal streams…
During the past 20 years, numerous stellar streams have been discovered in both the Milky Way and the Local Group. These streams have been tidally torn from orbiting systems, which suggests that most of them should roughly trace the orbit…
We explore the use of tidal streams from Galactic satellites to recover the potential of the Milky Way. Our study is motivated both by the discovery of the first lengthy stellar stream in the halo (\cite{it98}) and by the prospect of…
In the first of these two papers we demonstrated that assuming streams delineate orbits can lead to order one errors in potential parameters for realistic Galactic potentials. Motivated by the need for an improvement on orbit-fitting, we…
Tidal debris streams from galaxy satellites can provide insight into the dark matter distribution in halos. This is because we have more information about stars in a debris structure than about a purely random population of stars: we know…
We present a new method for determining the Galactic gravitational potential based on forward modeling of tidal stellar streams. We use this method to test the performance of smooth and static analytic potentials in representing realistic…
The dark matter halo of the Milky Way is expected to be triaxial and filled with substructure. It is hoped that streams or shells of stars produced by tidal disruption of stellar systems will provide precise measures of the gravitational…
We discuss how to use tidal streams from globular clusters to measure the mass distribution of the Milky Way. Recent proper motion determinations for globular clusters from plate measurements and Hipparcos astrometry provide several good…
Tidal streams provide a powerful tool by means of which the matter distribution of the dark matter halos of their host galaxies can be studied. However, the analysis is not straightforward because streams do not delineate orbits, and for…
Dark matter sub-halos that pass near or through a thin tidal star stream locally increase its velocity dispersion. Subsequent orbital evolution further increases the velocity dispersion and stream width, lowering the surface density of a…
Extended halo tidal streams from disrupting Milky Way satellites offer new opportunities for gauging fundamental Galactic parameters without challenging observations of the Galactic center. In the roughly spherical Galactic potential tidal…
Recent years have seen the discovery of an ever growing number of stellar debris streams and clouds. These structures are typically detected as extended and often curvilinear overdensities of metal-poor stars that stand out from the…
We assess the practicality of computing the distance to stellar streams in our Galaxy, using the method of Galactic parallax suggested by Eyre & Binney (2009). We find that the uncertainty in Galactic parallax is dependent upon the specific…
Several long, dynamically cold stellar streams have been observed around the Milky Way Galaxy, presumably formed from the tidal disruption of globular clusters. In integrable potentials---where all orbits are regular---tidal debris…
Simulations of tidal streams show that close encounters with dark matter subhalos induce density gaps and distortions in on-sky path along the streams. Accordingly, observing disrupted streams in the Galactic halo would substantiate the…
The positions and velocities of stellar streams have been used to constrain the mass and shape of the Milky Way's dark matter halo. Several extragalactic streams have already been detected, though it has remained unclear what can be…
We have simulated the evolution of tidal debris in the Galactic halo in order to guide our ongoing survey to determine the fraction of halo mass accreted via satellite infall. Contrary to naive expectations that the satellite debris will…
We present an analysis of the mechanics of thin streams, which are formed following the tidal disruption of cold, low-mass clusters in the potential of a massive host galaxy. The analysis makes extensive use of action-angle variables, in…