Related papers: Action-space clustering of tidal streams to infer …
In the Gaia era it is increasingly apparent that traditional static, parameterized models are insufficient to describe the mass distribution of our complex, dynamically evolving Milky Way (MW). In this work, we compare different…
In the coming decade the Gaia satellite will precisely measure the positions and velocities of millions of stars in the Galactic halo, including stars in many tidal streams. These streams, the products of hierarchical accretion of satellite…
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…
Most measurements of mass in Astronomy that use kinematics of stars or gas rely on assumptions of equilibrium that are often hard to verify. Instead, we develop a novel idea that uses the clustering in action space, as a probe of underlying…
One of the most promising tracers of the Galactic potential in the halo region are stellar streams. However, individual stream fits can be limited by systematic biases. To study these individual stream systematics, we fit streams in Milky…
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…
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…
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 investigate the non-adiabatic effect of time-dependent deformations in the Milky Way (MW) halo potential on stellar streams. Specifically, we consider the MW's response to the infall of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) and how this…
We analyze stellar streams in action-angle coordinates combined with recent local direct acceleration measurements to provide joint constraints on the potential of our Galaxy. Our stream analysis uses the Kullback-Leibler divergence with a…
The Gaia astrometric mission may offer an unprecedented opportunity to discover new tidal streams in the Galactic halo. To test this, we apply nGC3, a great-circle-cell count method that combines position and proper motion data to identify…
In the first of these two papers we demonstrated that assuming streams delineate orbits can lead to order one errors in potential parameters for realistic Galactic potentials. Motivated by the need for an improvement on orbit-fitting, we…
We describe a technique that finds orbits through the Galaxy that are consistent with measurements of a tidal stream, taking into account the extent that tidal streams do not precisely delineate orbits. We show that if accurate…
Stellar streams result from the tidal disruption of satellites and star clusters as they orbit a host galaxy, and can be very sensitive probes of the gravitational potential of the host system. We select and study narrow stellar streams…
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…
We explore the use of tidal streams from Galactic satellites to recover the potential of the Milky Way. Our study is motivated both by the discovery of the first lengthy stellar stream in the halo (\cite{it98}) and by the prospect of…
The Gaia mission promises to deliver precision astrometry at an unprecedented level, heralding a new era for discerning the kinematic and spatial coordinates of stars in our Galaxy. Here, we present a new technique for estimating the age of…
Cold stellar streams---produced by tidal disruptions of clusters---are long-lived, coherent dynamical features in the halo of the Milky Way. Due to their different ages and different positions in phase space, different streams tell us…
Simulations of tidal streams show that close encounters with dark matter subhalos induce density gaps and distortions in on-sky path along the streams. Accordingly, observing disrupted streams in the Galactic halo would substantiate the…
The positions and velocities of stellar streams have been used to constrain the mass and shape of the Milky Way's dark matter halo. Several extragalactic streams have already been detected, though it has remained unclear what can be…