Related papers: Modeling GD-1 Gaps in a Milky-Way Potential
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 steepness of the central density profiles of dark matter (DM) in low-mass galaxy halos (e.g. dwarf galaxies) is a powerful probe of the nature of DM. We propose a novel scheme to probe the inner profiles of galaxy subhalos using stellar…
Dark matter sub-halos that pass near or through a thin tidal star stream locally increase its velocity dispersion. Subsequent orbital evolution further increases the velocity dispersion and stream width, lowering the surface density of a…
One of the targets of the recently launched Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope is a diffuse gamma-ray background from dark-matter annihilation or decay in the Galactic halo. N-body simulations and theoretical arguments suggest that the dark…
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…
The distribution of dark matter (DM) subhalos in our Galaxy remains disputed, leading to varying $\gamma$-ray and $\nu$ flux predictions from their annihilation or decay. In this work, we study how, in the inner Galaxy, subhalo tidal…
Thin stellar streams, such as those resulting from the tidal disruption of globular clusters, have long been known and used as probes of the gravitational potential of our Galaxy, both its visible and dark contents. In particular, the…
Dynamically cold stellar streams from tidally dissolved globular clusters (GCs) serve as excellent tools to measure the Galactic mass distribution and show promise to probe the nature of dark matter. For successful application of these…
There is hope to discover dark matter subhalos free of stars (predicted by the current theory of structure formation) by observing gaps they produce in tidal streams. In fact, this is the most promising technique for dark substructure…
An all high-latitude sky survey for cool carbon giant stars in the Galactic halo has revealed 75 such stars, of which the majority are new detections. Of these, more than half are clustered on a Great Circle on the sky which intersects the…
Stellar tidal streams are sensitive tracers of the properties of the gravitational potential in which they orbit and detailed observations of their density structure can be used to place stringent constraints on fluctuations in the…
A pole-count analysis of the infrared 2MASS survey is presented, in order to identify faint stream-like structures within the halo of the Milky Way. Selecting stars with colours consistent with M-giant stars, we find a strong over-density…
CDM simulations predict that there are hundreds of lumps of with masses greater than 10e7 solar masses in the Milky Way halo. However, we know of only a dozen dwarf satellites close to this mass. Are these lumps simply lacking in stars or…
The spatial distribution of Milky Way (MW) subhaloes provides an important set of observables for testing cosmological models. These include the radial distribution of luminous satellites, planar configurations, and the abundance of dark…
We apply a semi-analytic galaxy formation model to two high resolution cosmological N-body simulations to investigate analogues of the Milky Way system. We select these according to observed properties of the Milky Way rather than by halo…
Constraints on dark matter halo masses from weak gravitational lensing can be improved significantly by using additional information about the morphology of their density distribution, leading to tighter cosmological constraints derived…
Stellar streams are particularly sensitive probes of the mass distribution of galaxies. In this work, we focus on the Helmi Streams, the remnants of an accreted dwarf galaxy orbiting the inner Milky Way. We examine in depth their peculiar…
Star streams in galactic halos are long, thin, unbound structures that will be disturbed by the thousands dark matter sub-halos that are predicted to be orbiting within the main halo. A sub-halo generally induces a localized wave in the…
We assess the practicality of computing the distance to stellar streams in our Galaxy, using the method of Galactic parallax suggested by Eyre & Binney (2009). We find that the uncertainty in Galactic parallax is dependent upon the specific…
The standard model of cosmology, the LCDM model, robustly predicts the existence of a multitude of dark matter 'subhaloes' around galaxies like the Milky Way. A wide variety of observations have been proposed to look for the gravitational…