Related papers: Tidal Debris as a Dark Matter Probe
Hundreds of globular clusters and dwarf galaxies encircle the Milky Way. Many of these systems have undergone partial disruption due to tidal forces, littering the halo with stellar streams. These tidal tails are sensitive to the Galactic…
Long tails and streams of stars are the most noticeable upshots of galaxy collisions. Their origin as gravitational, tidal, disturbances has however been recognized only less than fifty years ago and more than ten years after their first…
Dynamically cold stellar streams are ideal probes of the gravitational field of the Milky Way. This paper re-examines the question of how such streams might be used to test for the presence of "missing satellites" -the many thousands of…
In this work, we explore the idea that substructures like stellar clusters could be formed from the tidal stream produced in galactic minor mergers. We use $N$-body and SPH simulations of satellite galaxies interacting with a larger galaxy.…
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…
Tidal disruption events occur rarely in any individual galaxy. Over the last decade, however, time-domain surveys have begun to accumulate statistical samples of these flares. What dynamical processes are responsible for feeding stars to…
A fundamental prediction of the Lambda Cold Dark Matter (LCDM) cosmology is the centrally divergent cuspy density profile of dark matter haloes. Density cusps render CDM haloes resilient to tides, and protect dwarf galaxies embedded in them…
In this paper, we use hydrodynamic zoom-in simulations of Milky Way-type haloes to explore using dust as an observational tracer to discriminate between cold and warm dark matter (WDM) universes. Comparing a cold and 3.5 keV WDM particle…
The phase-space structure of our Galaxy holds the key to understand and reconstruct its formation. The Lambda-CDM model predicts a richly structured phase-space distribution of dark matter and (halo) stars, consisting of streams of…
Cosmological structure formation predicts that our galactic halo contains an enormous hierarchy of substructures and streams, the remnants of the merging hierarchy that began with tiny Earth mass microhalos. If these structures persist…
Two studies have recently reported the discovery of pronounced Halo substructure in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) commissioning data. Here we show that this Halo substructure is almost in its entirety due to the expected tidal stream…
Debris sent into the intergalactic medium during tidal collisions can tell us about several fundamental properties of galaxies, in particular their missing mass, both in the form of cosmological Dark Matter and so-called Lost Baryons. High…
Dwarf galaxies have a wide variety of structures, such as dark matter (DM) distribution, stellar-to-halo mass ratio, and stellar density. Recent high-resolution simulations have shown a variety of stellar-to-halo mass ratios for dwarf…
Stars that escape globular clusters form tidal tails that are predominantly shaped by the global distribution of mass in the Galaxy, but also preserve a historical record of small-scale perturbations. Using deep $grz$ photometry from…
A decade ago cosmological simulations of increasingly higher resolution were used to demonstrate that virialized regions of Cold Dark Matter (CDM) halos are filled with a multitude of dense, gravitationally-bound clumps. These dark matter…
The orbital decay and tidal disruption of a star cluster in a galaxy is studied in an analytical manner. Owing to dynamical friction, the star cluster spirals in toward the center of the galaxy. Simultaneously, the galactic tidal field…
The predicted abundance and properties of the low-mass substructures embedded inside larger dark matter haloes differ sharply among alternative dark matter models. Too small to host galaxies themselves, these subhaloes may still be detected…
All galaxies are thought to reside within large halos of dark matter, whose properties can only be determined from indirect observations. The formation and assembly of galaxies is determined from the interplay between these dark matter…
We present a brief history of Galactic astrophysics, and explain the origin of halo substructure in the Galaxy. We motivate our study of tidal streams by highlighting the tight constraints that analysis of the trajectories of tidal streams…
As the Milky Way and its satellite system become more entrenched in near field cosmology efforts, the need for an accurate mass estimate of the Milky Way's dark matter halo is increasingly critical. With the second and early third data…