Related papers: Disentangling satellite galaxy populations using o…
I review recent SDSS results related to galaxies and large scale structure, including: (1) discovery of coherent, unbound structures in the stellar halo, (2) demonstration that Pal 5 has tidal tails and Draco doesn't, (3) precise…
Galactic halos are known to grow hierarchically, inside out. This implies a correlation between the infall lookback time of satellites and their binding energy. Cosmological simulations predict a linear relation between the infall lookback…
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…
The study of satellite galaxies can provide information on the merging and aggregation processes which, according to the hierarchical clustering models, form the larger spiral galaxies we observe. With the aim of testing hierarchical models…
Satellite galaxies endure powerful environmental tidal forces that drive mass stripping of their outer regions. Consequently, satellites located in central regions of galaxy clusters or groups, where the tidal field is strongest, are…
Satellite galaxies in galaxy clusters represent a significant fraction of the global galaxy population. Because of the unusual dense environment of clusters, their evolution is driven by different mechanisms than the ones affecting field or…
We calculate orbits for the Milky Way dwarf galaxies with proper motions, and compare these to subhalo orbits in a high resolution cosmological simulation. We use this same simulation to assess how well are able to recover orbits in the…
Minor merging has been postulated as the most likely evolutionary path to produce the increase in size and mass observed in the massive galaxies since z$\sim$2. In this Letter, we test directly this hypothesis comparing the population of…
The merging history of galaxies can be traced with studies of dynamically close pairs. These consist of a massive primary galaxy and a less massive secondary (or satellite) galaxy. The study of the stellar populations of secondary (lower…
The hierarchical mergers that form the haloes of dark matter surrounding galaxies, groups and clusters are not entirely efficient, leaving substantial amounts of dense substructure, in the form of stripped halo cores or `subhaloes',…
We estimate the Milky Way (MW) halo properties using satellite kinematic data including the latest measurements from Gaia DR2. With a simulation-based 6D phase-space distribution function (DF) of satellite kinematics, we can infer halo…
We study the quenching of satellite galaxies by gradual depletion of gas due to star formation, by ram-pressure striping and by tidally triggered starburst. Using progenitors constrained by the empirical model of Lu et al., in which outflow…
We study the optimal control of an arbitrarily large constellation of small satellites operating in low Earth orbit. Simulating the lack of on-board propulsion, we limit our actuation to the use of differential drag maneuvers to make…
We investigate the ability of basis function expansions to reproduce the evolution of a Milky Way-like dark matter halo, extracted from a cosmological zoom-in simulation. For each snapshot, the density of the halo is reduced to a basis…
We run numerical simulations of the disruption of satellite galaxies in a Galactic potential to build up the entire stellar halo, in order to investigate what the next generation of astrometric satellites will reveal by observing the halo…
Local Group satellite galaxies show a wide diversity of star formation histories (SFHs) whose origin is yet to be fully understood. Using hydrodynamical simulations from the Constrained Local UniversE project, we study the SFHs of…
Observations have shown that the spatial distribution of satellite galaxies is not random, but aligned with the major axes of central galaxies. This alignment is dependent on galaxy properties, such that red satellites are more strongly…
We study the impact of the environment on galaxies as they fall in and orbit in the potential well of a Local Group (LG) analogue, following them with high cadence. The analysis is performed on eight disc satellite galaxies from the CIELO…
Satellites constitute an important fraction of the overall galaxy population and are believed to form in dark matter subhalos. Here we use the cosmological hydrodynamic simulation TNG100 to investigate how the formation histories of…
We have developed a simple yet surprisingly accurate analytic scheme for tracking the dynamical evolution of substructure within larger dark halos. The scheme incorporates the effects of dynamical friction, tidal mass loss and tidal heating…