Related papers: On the Stability of Tidal Streams
Tidal tails composed of stars should be unstable to the Jeans instability and this can cause them to look like beads on a string. The Jeans wavelength and tail diameter determine the wavelength and growth rate of the fastest growing…
We use a hybrid test particle/N-body simulation to integrate 4 million massless test particle trajectories within a fully self-consistent 10^5 particle N-body simulation. The number of massless particles allows us to resolve fine structure…
Thin stellar streams, such as those resulting from the tidal disruption of globular clusters, have long been known and used as probes of the gravitational potential of our Galaxy, both its visible and dark contents. In particular, the…
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…
By means of direct N-body simulations and simplified numerical models, we study the formation and characteristics of the tidal tails around Palomar 5, along its orbit in the Milky Way potential. Unlike previous findings, we are able to…
In this paper we report a study (see Mastrobuono-Battisti et al., 2012) about the formation and characteristics of the tidal tails around Palomar 5 along its orbit in the Milky Way potential, by means of direct N-body simulations and…
Stars that escape globular clusters form tidal tails that are predominantly shaped by the global distribution of mass in the Galaxy, but also preserve a historical record of small-scale perturbations. Using deep $grz$ photometry from…
Thin halo star streams originate from the evaporation of globular clusters and therefore provide information about the early epoch globular cluster population. The observed tidal tails from halo globular clusters in the Milky Way are much…
This paper presents an example where the morphology of a single stellar stream can be used to rule out a specific galactic potential form without the need for velocity information. We investigate the globular cluster Palomar5 (Pal 5), which…
Simulations are run with and without a normal cold dark matter sub-halo population below 4x10^8 M_sun to examine the role of the lower mass sub-halos in the creation of density variations, "gaps", within thin tidal star streams. Dense star…
Pal 5 is a low mass, low velocity dispersion, globular cluster with spectacular tidal tails. We use the SDSS DR8 data to extend the density measurements of the trailing star stream to 23 degrees distance from the cluster, at which point the…
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…
I present an organic description of the regimes of collisionless tidal streams and define the orderings between the physical quantities that shape their morphology. Three fundamental dichotomies are identified in the form of dimensionless…
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…
We explore whether stellar tidal streams can provide information on the secular, cosmological evolution of the Milky Way's gravitational potential and on the presence of subhalos. We carry out long-term (~t_hubble) N-body simulations of…
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 detected extended, curved stellar tidal tails emanating from the sparse, disrupting halo globular cluster Pal 5, which cover 10 degrees on the sky. These streams allow us to infer the orbit of Pal 5 and to ultimately constrain the…
Recent works have proposed the idea of a tidal screening scenario, in which tidal forces determine the mass that a protostar can accrete to explain the IMF. In this scenario, gravitationally unstable fragments will compete for the gas…
Tidal streams of globular clusters are ideal tracers of the Galactic gravitational potential. Compared to the few known, complex and diffuse dwarf-galaxy streams, they are kinematically cold, have thin morphologies and are abundant in the…
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…