Related papers: Constraining the Milky Way Halo Shape Using Thin S…
We use ESA/Gaia astrometry together with SEGUE and LAMOST measurements of the GD-1 stellar stream to explore the improvement on the Galactic gravitational potential that these new data provide. Assuming a realistic universal model for the…
The shape distortion of the presumed Milky Way dark matter halo can impact the local density of dark matter and thus the direct detection program. We examine the population of galactic rotation curves measured by SPARC and fit them to dark…
Recent observations suggest that Carina and other nearby dwarf spheroidal galaxies are surrounded by unbound stars tidally stripped by the Milky Way. We run high-resolution N-Body simulations of dwarf galaxies orbiting within the Milky Way…
The gravitational interaction between the Milky Way (MW) and the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) perturbs the MW halo's density and kinematics, encoding information about both galaxies' masses and structures. We present a suite of 2,848…
I use high resolution N-body/SPH simulations to model the new proper motion of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) within the Milky Way (MW) halo and investigate the effects of gravitational and hydrodynamical forces on the formation of the…
We perform a search for stellar streams around the Milky Way using the first three years of multi-band optical imaging data from the Dark Energy Survey (DES). We use DES data covering $\sim 5000$ sq. deg. to a depth of $g > 23.5$ with a…
A sample of roughly 1,800 halo subdwarf stars with radial velocities and proper motions is assembled, using the repeated multi-band Sloan Digital Sky Survey photometric measurements in Stripe 82. Our sample of halo subdwarfs is extracted…
We introduce a new technique to constrain the line-of-sight integrated electron density of our Galactic halo $\text{DM}_\text{MW,halo}$ through analysis of the observed dispersion measure distributions of pulsars $\text{DM}_\text{pulsar}$…
A parameterized model of the mass distribution within the Milky Way is fitted to the available observational constraints. The most important single parameter is the ratio of the scale length R_d* of the stellar disk to R0. The disk and…
Cold dark matter halos are expected to be triaxial and often tilted relative to the stellar disk. Stellar streams provide a sensitive tracer of the Milky Way's halo shape, though models for the Galactic potential are typically limited to…
We investigate the possibility that the recently discovered Hercules Milky Way satellite is in fact a stellar stream in formation, thereby explaining its very elongated shape with an axis ratio of 3 to 1. Under the assumption that Hercules…
We analyse the dynamical properties of substructures in a high-resolution dark matter simulation of the formation of a Milky Way-like halo in a $\Lambda$CDM cosmology. Our goal is to shed light on the dynamical peculiarities of the Milky…
Recent observations have revealed a trove of unexpected morphological features in many of the Milky Way's stellar streams. Explanations for such features include time-dependent deformations of the Galactic gravitational potential, local…
We characterise the radial density, metallicity and flattening profile of the Milky Way's stellar halo, based on the large sample of 1757 spectroscopically confirmed giant stars from SDSS/SEGUE-2 after excising stars that were…
Tidal debris streams from galaxy satellites can provide insight into the dark matter distribution in halos. This is because we have more information about stars in a debris structure than about a purely random population of stars: we know…
We develop a semi-analytic method for determining the phase-space population of tidal debris along the orbit of a disrupting satellite galaxy and illustrate its use with a number of applications. We use this method to analyze Zhao's…
We have analyzed the phase space distribution of a sample of about 900 non--kinematically selected low metallicity stars in the solar vicinity. The stars primarily represent the thick disk and halo populations of the Milky Way. We aim to…
A method to search for tidal streams and to fit their orbits based on maximum likelihood is presented and applied to the Gaia data. Tests of the method are performed showing how a simulated stream produced by tidal stripping of a star…
As the Milky Way and its satellite system become more entrenched in near field cosmology efforts, the need for an accurate mass estimate of the Milky Way's dark matter halo is increasingly critical. With the second and early third data…
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…