Related papers: Incorporating Streams into Milky Way Models
The Milky Way halo was predominantly formed by the merging of numerous progenitor galaxies. However, our knowledge of this process is still incomplete, especially in regard to the total number of mergers, their global dynamical properties…
In the past decade, surveys of the stellar component of the Galaxy have revealed a number of streams from tidally disrupted dwarf galaxies and globular clusters. Simulations of hierarchical structure formation in LCDM cosmologies predict…
The Milky Way's stellar halo, which extends to $>100$ kpc, encodes the evolutionary history of our Galaxy. However, most studies of the halo to date have been limited to within a few kpc of the Sun. Here, we characterize differences between…
Many properties of the Milky Way's dark matter halo, including its mass assembly history, concentration, and subhalo population, remain poorly constrained. We explore the connection between these properties of the Milky Way and its…
Stellar streams -- formed from tidally stripped globular clusters or dwarf galaxies -- are sensitive tracers of a galaxy's accretion history and gravitational potential. While numerous streams are known in the Milky Way (MW), the formation…
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 present MWFitting, a method to fit the stellar components of the Galaxy by comparing Hess Diagrams (HDs) from TRILEGAL models to real data. We apply MWFitting to photometric data from the first three years of the Dark Energy Survey…
Measurements of velocity and density perturbations along stellar streams in the Milky Way provide a time integrated measure of dark matter substructure at larger galactic radius than the complementary instantaneous inner halo strong lensing…
Recent observations have revealed streams of gas and stars in the halo of the Milky Way that are the debris from interactions between our Galaxy and some of its dwarf companion galaxies; the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy and the Magellanic…
We analyse systems analogous to the Milky Way (MW) in the EAGLE cosmological hydrodynamics simulation in order to deduce the likely structure of the MW's dark matter halo. We identify MW-mass haloes in the simulation whose satellite…
Stellar streams are sensitive to perturbations from, e.g., giant molecular clouds, bars and spiral arms, infalling dwarf galaxies, or globular clusters which can imprint gaps, clumps, spurs, and asymmetries in tails. In addition to these…
The shape and orientation of the Milky Way's dark matter halo remain poorly constrained. Observations of the accreted stellar halo show that it is triaxial and tilted with respect to the disc. If this configuration is long-lived, it can…
The growing trove of precision astrometric observations from the Gaia space telescope and other surveys is revealing the structure and dynamics of the Milky Way in ever more exquisite detail. We summarize the current status of our…
The cold dark matter picture predicts an abundance of substructure within the Galactic halo. However, most substructures host no stars and can only be detected indirectly. Stellar streams present a promising probe of this dark substructure.…
We discuss how to use tidal streams from globular clusters to measure the mass distribution of the Milky Way. Recent proper motion determinations for globular clusters from plate measurements and Hipparcos astrometry provide several good…
Within the hierarchical framework for galaxy formation, merging and tidal interactions are expected to shape large galaxies to this day. While major mergers are quite rare at present, minor mergers and satellite disruptions - which result…
We present a proposal for the full phase space distribution of the Milky Way halo. The model is axially and reflection symmetric and its time evolution is self-similar. It describes the halo as a set of discrete dark matter flows with…
We performed an extended analysis of the parameter space for the interaction of the Magellanic System with the Milky Way (MW). The varied parameters cover the phase space parameters, the masses, the structure, and the orientation of both…
We use cosmological N-body simulations from the Aquarius Project to study the tidal effects of a dark matter halo on the shape and orientation of its substructure. Although tides are often assumed to enhance asphericity and to stretch…
We address the problem of identifying remnants of satellite galaxies in the halo of our galaxy with Gaia data. The remnants have to be extracted from a very large data set (of order 10^9 stars) in the presence of observational errors and…