Related papers: The Milky Way system in LCDM cosmological simulati…
Using the spectroscopic catalogue of the Sloan Digital Survey Data Release 10, we have explored the abundance of satellites around a sample of 254 massive (10^11< M_star < 2 x 10^11 M_sun) local (z < 0.025) galaxies. We have divided our…
(Abridged) We perform dissipationless N-body simulations to elucidate the dynamical response of thin disks to bombardment by cold dark matter (CDM) substructure. Our method combines (1) cosmological simulations of the formation of Milky Way…
We present structural parameters from a wide-field homogeneous imaging survey of Milky Way satellites carried out with the MegaCam imagers on the 3.6m Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) and 6.5m Magellan-Clay telescope. Our survey…
Numerical simulations have revealed the presence of long-lived substructure in Cold Dark Matter (CDM) halos. These surviving cores of past merger and accretion events vastly outnumber the known satellites of the Milky Way. This finding has…
The Milky Way has at least twenty-three known satellite galaxies that shine with luminosities ranging from about a thousand to a billion times that of the Sun. Half of these galaxies were discovered in the past few years in the Sloan…
We present robust constraints from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) on the shape and distribution of the dark matter halo within the Milky Way (MW). Using the number density distribution and kinematics of SDSS halo stars, we probe the…
(ABRIDGED) We present a semi-analytic model to explore merger histories, destruction rates, and survival probabilities of substructure in dark matter halos and use it to study the substructure populations of galaxy-sized halos as a function…
Massive satellite accretions onto early galactic disks can lead to the deposition of dark matter in disk-like configurations that co-rotate with the galaxy. This phenomenon has potentially dramatic consequences for dark matter detection…
We present a family of robust tracer mass estimators to compute the enclosed mass of galaxy haloes from samples of discrete positional and kinematical data of tracers, such as halo stars, globular clusters and dwarf satellites. The data may…
A critical challenge to the cold dark matter (CDM) paradigm is that there are fewer satellites observed around the Milky Way than found in simulations of dark matter substructure. We show that there is a match between the observed satellite…
We present the structure of the Milky Way stellar halo beyond Galactocentric distances of $r = 50$ kpc traced by blue horizontal-branch (BHB) stars, which are extracted from the survey data in the Hyper Suprime-Cam Subaru Strategic Program…
Dark matter only simulations of galaxy formation predict many more subhalos around a Milky Way like galaxy than the number of observed satellites. Proposed solutions require the satellites to inhabit dark matter halos with masses between…
The mass of the dark matter halo of the Milky Way can be estimated by fitting analytical models to the phase-space distribution of dynamical tracers. We test this approach using realistic mock stellar halos constructed from the Aquarius…
Motivated by the presence of numerous dark matter clumps in the Milky Way's halo as expected from the cold dark matter cosmological model, we conduct numerical simulations to examine the heating of the disk. We construct an initial galaxy…
We use archival UV absorption-line data from HST/STIS to statistically analyse the absorption characteristics of the high-velocity clouds (HVCs) in the Galactic halo towards more than 40 extragalactic background sources. We determine…
An analytical model predicting the growth rates, the absolute growth times and the saturation values of the magnetic field strength within galactic haloes is presented. The analytical results are compared to cosmological MHD simulations of…
The stellar halo of the Milky Way records the history of its interactions with dwarf galaxies, whose subsequent destruction results in the formation of an extended stellar component. Recent works have suggested that galaxies with masses…
I review current efforts to measure the mean density of dark matter near the Sun. This encodes valuable dynamical information about our Galaxy and is also of great importance for 'direct detection' dark matter experiments. I discuss…
We present the results of clustering analyses of Lyman break galaxies (LBGs) at $z\sim3$, $4$, and $5$ using the final data release of the Canada--France--Hawaii Telescope Legacy Survey (CFHTLS). Deep- and wide-field images of the CFHTLS…
We use a sample of 83 high-resolution cosmological zoom-in simulations and a semi-analytic model (SAM) to study the stochasticity of galaxy formation in haloes ranging from dwarf to Milky Way masses. Our simulated galaxies reproduce the…