Related papers: Locating the orbits delineated by tidal streams
Mergers and tidal interactions between massive galaxies and their dwarf satellites are a fundamental prediction of the Lambda-Cold Dark Matter cosmology. These events are thought to influence galaxy evolution throughout cosmic history and…
A sufficiently extended satellite in the tidal field of a host galaxy loses mass to create nearly symmetric leading and trailing tidal streams. We study the case in which tidal heating drives mass loss from a low mass satellite. The stream…
Tidal streams are a powerful probe of the Milky Way (MW) potential shape. In this paper, we introduce a simple test particle method to fit stream data, using a Markov Chain Monte Carlo technique to marginalise over uncertainties in the…
We present a maximum likelihood method for determining the spatial properties of tidal debris and of the Galactic spheroid. With this method we characterize Sagittarius debris using stars with the colors of blue F turnoff stars in SDSS…
Within the hierarchical framework for galaxy formation, merging and tidal interactions are expected to shape large galaxies to this day. While major mergers are quite rare at present, minor mergers and satellite disruptions - which result…
Flat rotation curves follow from elongated Dark Matter distributions, as shown by our earlier competitive fits to the SPARC database. Intending to probe that distortion of the DM halo one needs observables not contained by the galactic…
Recently, we determined a lower bound for the Milky Way mass in a point mass approximation. This result was obtained for most general spherically symmetric phase-space distribution functions consistent with a measured radial velocity…
Thin stellar streams, formed from the tidal disruption of globular clusters, are important gravitational tools, sensitive to both global and small-scale properties of dark matter. The Palomar 5 stellar stream (Pal 5) is an exemplar stream…
The Cold Dark Matter paradigm predicts vast numbers of dark matter sub-halos to be orbiting in galactic halos. The sub-halos are detectable through the gaps they create gaps in stellar streams. The gap-rate is an integral over the density…
We study tidal dissipation in stars with masses in the range $0.1-1.6 M_\odot$ throughout their evolution, including turbulent effective viscosity acting on equilibrium tides and inertial waves in convection zones, and internal gravity…
We present a spectroscopic survey of the giant stellar stream found in the halo of the Andromeda galaxy. Taken with the DEIMOS multi-object spectrograph on the Keck2 telescope, these data display a narrow velocity dispersion of 11+/-3 km/s,…
Using the example of the tidal stream of the Milky Way globular cluster Palomar 5 (Pal 5), we demonstrate how observational data on streams can be efficiently reduced in dimensionality and modeled in a Bayesian framework. Our approach…
The hierarchical model of galaxy formation predicts that the Milky Way halo is populated by tidal debris of dwarf galaxies and globular clusters. Due to long dynamical times, debris from the lowest mass objects remains coherent as thin and…
We present the results of fitting a flexible stellar stream density model to a collection of thirteen streams around the Milky Way, using photometric data from DES, DECaLS, and Pan-STARRS. We construct density maps for each stream and…
The dark matter subhalos orbiting in a galactic halo perturb the orbits of stars in thin stellar streams. Over time the random velocities in the streams develop non-Gaussian wings. The rate of velocity increase is approximately a random…
In the past decade, surveys of the stellar component of the Galaxy have revealed a number of streams from tidally disrupted dwarf galaxies and globular clusters. Simulations of hierarchical structure formation in LCDM cosmologies predict…
Stellar tidal streams are a key tracer of galaxy evolution and have the potential to provide an indirect means for tracing dark matter. For the Local Group, many diffuse substructures have been identified and their link to galaxy evolution…
Observations show that stellar streams originating in satellite dwarf galaxies are frequent in the Universe. While such events are predicted by theory, it is not clear how many of the streams that are generated are washed out afterwards to…
We present a data-driven method for reconstructing the galactic acceleration field from phase-space measurements of stellar streams. Our approach is based on a flexible and differentiable fit to the stream in phase-space, enabling a direct…
We use Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 5 photometry and spectroscopy to study a tidal stream that extends over 50 degrees in the North Galactic Cap. From the analysis of the path of the stream and the colors and magnitudes of its…