Related papers: A statistical method for measuring the Galactic po…
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…
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 present a generative probabilistic model for a tidal stream and demonstrate how this model is used to constrain the Galactic potential. The model takes advantage of the simple structure of a stream in angle and frequency space for the…
A tracer sample in a gravitational potential, starting from a generic initial condition, phase-mixes towards a stationary state. This evolution is accompanied by an entropy increase, and the final state is characterized by a distribution…
Tidal streams of disrupting dwarf galaxies orbiting around their host galaxy offer a unique way to constrain the shape of galactic gravitational potentials. Such streams can be used as leaning tower gravitational experiments on galactic…
A method is proposed for constraining the Galactic gravitational potential from high precision observations of the phase space coordinates of a system of relaxed tracers. The method relies on an "ergodic" assumption that the observations…
Stream stars removed by tides from their progenitor satellite galaxy or globular cluster act as a group of test particles on neighboring orbits, probing the gravitational field of the Milky Way. While constraints from individual streams…
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…
Kinematically cold tidal streams of globular clusters (GC) are excellent tracers of the Galactic gravitational potential at moderate Galactocentric distances, and can also be used as probes of the law of gravity on Galactic scales. Here, we…
Motivated by recent observations of the Sagittarius stream, we devise a rapid algorithm to generate faithful representations of the centroids of stellar tidal streams formed in a disruption of a progenitor of an arbitrary mass in an…
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…
We show that a small, but \textit{measurable} shift in the eclipse mid-point time of eclipsing binary (EBs) stars of $\sim$ 0.1 seconds over a decade baseline can be used to directly measure the Galactic acceleration of stars in the Milky…
Starting from an important research path, we consider gravity as a collective phenomenon governed by statistical mechanics. While previous studies have focussed on the thermodynamic heat flow across a 2d-horizon as perceived by a single,…
We develop a method for constraining the potential of the Milky Way using stellar streams with a known progenitor. The method expresses the stream in angle-action coordinates and integrates the orbits of the stars backwards in time to…
We present a model for producing tidal streams from disrupting progenitors in arbitrary potentials, utilizing the idea that the majority of stars escape from the progenitor's two Lagrange points. The method involves releasing test particles…
Selection effects, such as interstellar extinction and varying survey depth, complicate efforts to determine the gravitational potential - and thus the distribution of baryonic and dark matter - throughout the Milky Way galaxy using stellar…
In this paper, we introduce a flexible and widely applicable nonparametric entropy-based testing procedure that can be used to assess the validity of simple hypotheses about a specific parametric population distribution. The testing…
We develop the method of Maximum Entropy (ME) as a technique to generate approximations to probability distributions. The central results consist in (a) justifying the use of relative entropy as the uniquely natural criterion to select a…
In this paper we discuss a method for the generation of mock tidal streams. Using an ensemble of simulations in an isochrone potential where the actions and frequencies are known, we derive an empirical recipe for the evolving satellite…
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…