Related papers: Determining orbits for the Milky Way's dwarfs
The age distribution, and chemical elemental abundances, of stars in the halo of the Milky Way provide constraints on theories of galaxy formation. As one specific example, the accretion of satellite galaxies similar to the present retinue…
Observations of the low-mass satellites in the Local Group have shown high fractions of gas-poor, quiescent galaxies relative to isolated dwarfs, implying that the host halo environment plays an important role in the quenching of dwarf…
According to the current cosmological cold dark matter paradigm, the Galactic halo could have been the result of the assemblage of smaller structures. Here we explore the hypothesis that the classical and ultra-faint dwarf spheroidal…
Are dwarf spheroidal galaxies dark matter dominated? We present N-body simulations of the interaction between the Milky Way and its closest companion, the Sagittarius dwarf spheroidal galaxy, constrained by new kinematic, distance and…
By fitting a flexible stellar anisotropy model to the observed surface brightness and line-of-sight velocity dispersion profiles of Draco we derive a sequence of cosmologically plausible two-component (stars + dark matter) models for this…
We calculate the orbital angular momentum of dark matter subhaloes in the Aquarius simulations of cold dark matter galactic haloes. We calculate the orientation of their angular momentum relative to that of the spin vector of their host…
We employ numerical simulations and simple analytical estimates to argue that dark matter substructures orbiting in the inner regions of the Galaxy can be efficiently destroyed by disk shocking, a dynamical process known to affect globular…
We apply a semi-analytic galaxy formation model to two high resolution cosmological N-body simulations to investigate analogues of the Milky Way system. We select these according to observed properties of the Milky Way rather than by halo…
Dwarf satellite galaxies are thought to be the remnants of the population of primordial structures that coalesced to form giant galaxies like the Milky Way. An early analysis noted that dwarf galaxies may not be isotropically distributed…
CDM simulations predict that there are hundreds of lumps of with masses greater than 10e7 solar masses in the Milky Way halo. However, we know of only a dozen dwarf satellites close to this mass. Are these lumps simply lacking in stars or…
The existence of ultra-faint dwarf (UFD) galaxies highlights the need to push our theoretical understanding of galaxies to extremely low mass. We examine the formation of UFDs by twice running a fully cosmological simulations of dwarf…
The outer parts of the Milky Way's disc are significantly out of equilibrium. Using only distances and proper motions of stars from Gaia's Early Data Release 3, in the range |b|<10{\deg}, 130{\deg}<l<230{\deg}, we show that for stars in the…
We use a semi-analytical model for the substructure of dark matter haloes to assess the too-big-to-fail (TBTF) problem. The model accurately reproduces the average subhalo mass and velocity functions, as well as their halo-to-halo variance,…
The mass of the dark matter halo of the Milky Way can be estimated by fitting analytical models to the phase-space distribution of dynamical tracers. We test this approach using realistic mock stellar halos constructed from the Aquarius…
We combine our Hubble Space Telescope measurement of the proper motion of the Leo I dwarf spheroidal galaxy (presented in a companion paper) with the highest resolution numerical simulations of Galaxy-size dark matter halos in existence to…
We trace the cosmological origin of satellites around a dwarf galaxy using a very high resolution (12~pc/h) cosmological hydrodynamic zoom simulation. To realistically describe the formation and evolution of small-mass stellar satellites,…
We use a combination of high-resolution gasdynamics simulations of high-redshift dwarf galaxies and dissipationless simulations of a Milky Way sized halo to estimate the expected abundance and spatial distribution of the dwarf satellite…
Dwarf galaxies are valuable laboratories for dynamical studies related to dark matter and galaxy evolution, yet it is currently unknown just how physically extended their stellar components are. Satellites orbiting the Galaxy's potential…
We study the orbits of ultra-faint dwarf galaxies in the combined presence of the Milky Way and LMC and we find 6 dwarfs which were likely accreted with the LMC (Car 2, Car 3, Hor 1, Hyi 1, Phe 2, Ret 2), in addition to the SMC,…
Using collisionless N-body simulations of dwarf galaxies orbiting the Milky Way (MW) we construct realistic models of dwarf spheroidal (dSph) galaxies of the Local Group. The dwarfs are initially composed of stellar disks embedded in dark…