Related papers: Touching The Void: A Striking Drop in Stellar Halo…
The Gaia HR diagram shows the presence of apparently young stars at high tangential velocities. Using a simple analytical model I show that these stars are likely to be blue stragglers. Once normalized to red giant stars, the fraction of…
The radial number density and flattening of the Milky Way's stellar halo is measured with $\mathrm{5351}$ metal-poor ([Fe/H]$<-1$) K giants from LAMOST DR3, using a nonparametric method which is model independent and largely avoids the…
We present a comprehensive study of the chemical properties of the stellar haloes of Milky-Way mass galaxies, analysing the transition between the inner to the outer haloes. We find the transition radius between the relative dominance of…
Halo stars orbit within the potential of the Milky Way and hence their kinematics can be used to understand the underlying mass distribution. However, the inferred mass distribution depends sensitively upon assumptions made on the density…
Using K giants from the second data release (DR2) of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) Milky Way (MW) Survey, we measure the shape, orientation, radial profile, and density anisotropies of the MW stellar halo over 8…
Currently only a small number of Milky Way (MW) stars are known to exist beyond 100 kpc from the Galactic center. Though the distribution of these stars in the outer halo is believed to be sparse, they can provide evidence of more recent…
We use distant Blue Horizontal Branch stars with Galactocentric distances 16 < r/kpc < 48 as kinematic tracers of the Milky Way dark halo. We model the tracer density as an oblate, power-law embedded within a spherical power-law potential.…
Here we present a kinematic study of the Galactic halo out to a radius of $\sim$ 60 kpc, using 4664 blue horizontal branch (BHB) stars selected from the SDSS/SEGUE survey, to determine key dynamical properties. Using a maximum likelihood…
We use 666 blue horizontal branch (BHB) stars from the 2Qz redshift survey to map the Galactic halo in four dimensions (position, distance and velocity). We find that the halo extends to at least 100 kpc in Galactocentric distance, and…
We use the Bullock & Johnston suite of simulations to study the density profiles of L*-type galaxy stellar haloes. Observations of the Milky Way and M31 stellar haloes show contrasting results: the Milky Way has a `broken' profile, where…
We describe a major survey of the Milky Way halo designed to test for kinematic substructure caused by destruction of accreted satellites. We use the Washington photometric system to identify halo stars efficiently for spectroscopic…
AIMS. We derive the morphology of the stellar component in the outer halo volume, and search for possible overdensities due to substructures therein. METHODS. We made use of some of the data releases of the spectroscopic survey LAMOST…
If the stellar halos of disk galaxies are built up from the disruption of dwarf galaxies, models predict highly structured variations in the stellar populations within these halos. We test this prediction by studying the ratio of blue…
We analyze the anisotropy profile of the Milky Way's smooth, diffuse stellar halo using SDSS/SEGUE blue horizontal branch stars and SDSS/SEGUE and LAMOST K giants. These intrinsically luminous stars allow us to probe the halo to…
We propose and test a method for applying statistical photometric parallax to main sequence turn off (MSTO) stars in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). Using simulated data, we show that if our density model is similar to the actual…
We present a spectroscopic sample of 910 distant halo stars from the Hypervelocity Star survey from which we derive the velocity dispersion profile of the Milky Way halo. The sample is a mix of 74% evolved horizontal branch stars and 26%…
We exploit the exquisite, deep Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC) imaging data to probe the Galactic halo out to 200 kpc. Using the ~100 square degree, multi-band photometry of the first HSC Wide survey data release, we identify blue horizontal branch…
We investigate the structure of the Milky Way's stellar halo within 70 kpc of the Sun using a wide-field photometric catalog obtained from the Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC) Subaru Strategic Program (HSC-SSP). We employ a large sample of…
We present a statistical method to derive the stellar density profiles of the Milky Way from spectroscopic survey data, taking into account selection effects. We assume that the selection function of the spectroscopic survey is based on…
We use Gaia photometry and astrometry to estimate the vertical spatial structure of the Milky Way at the Solar radius, formally accounting for sample incompleteness (the selection function) and parallax measurement uncertainty. Our results…