Related papers: Velocity Variations in the Phoenix-Hermus Star Str…
We perform a search for stellar streams around the Milky Way using the first three years of multi-band optical imaging data from the Dark Energy Survey (DES). We use DES data covering $\sim 5000$ sq. deg. to a depth of $g > 23.5$ with a…
We present a spectroscopic survey of the giant stellar stream found in the halo of the Andromeda galaxy. Taken with the DEIMOS multi-object spectrograph on the Keck2 telescope, these data display a narrow velocity dispersion of 11+/-3 km/s,…
Typical stars in the Milky Way galaxy have velocities of hundreds of kilometres per second and experience gravitational accelerations of $\sim 10^{-10}$ m s$^{-2}$, resulting in velocity changes of a few centimetres per second over a…
In the early universe, substantial relative "stream" velocities between the gas and dark matter arise due to radiation pressure and persist after recombination. To asses the impact of these velocities on high-redshift structure formation,…
We derive new constraints on the mass of the Milky Way's dark matter halo, based on a set of halo stars from SDSS as kinematic tracers. Our sample comprises 2401 rigorously selected Blue Horizontal-Branch (BHB) halo stars drawn from SDSS…
How, when and where the first stars formed are fundamental questions regarding the epoch of Cosmic Dawn. A second order effect in the fluid equations was recently found to make a significant contribution: an offset velocity between gas and…
Cold dark matter halos are expected to be triaxial and often tilted relative to the stellar disk. Stellar streams provide a sensitive tracer of the Milky Way's halo shape, though models for the Galactic potential are typically limited to…
Observations of density variations in stellar streams are a promising probe of low-mass dark matter substructure in the Milky Way. However, survey systematics such as variations in seeing and sky brightness can also induce artificial…
Stellar streams trace the gravitational potential of their host galaxies and offer a direct probe of dark matter halo geometry. Cosmological simulations predict that halo shapes depend on both baryonic physics and the nature of dark matter,…
Large samples of Field Horizontal Branch (FHB) stars make excellent tracers of the Galactic halo; by studying their kinematics, one can infer important physical properties of our Galaxy. Here we present the results of a medium-resolution…
We construct a new sample of ~1700 solar neighbourhood halo subdwarfs from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, selected using a reduced proper motion diagram. Radial velocities come from the SDSS spectra and proper motions from the light-motion…
Tidal debris streams from galaxy satellites can provide insight into the dark matter distribution in halos. This is because we have more information about stars in a debris structure than about a purely random population of stars: we know…
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…
The Halo Assembly in Lambda-CDM: Observations in 7 Dimensions (HALO7D) dataset consists of Keck II/DEIMOS spectroscopy and Hubble Space Telescope-measured proper motions of Milky Way halo main sequence turnoff stars in the CANDELS fields.…
Data from the Gaia satellite show that the solar neighbourhood of the Milky Way's stellar halo is imprinted with substructure from several accretion events. Evidence of these events is found in "the Shards", stars clustering with high…
The local stellar halo of the Milky Way contains the debris from several past accretion events. Here we study in detail the structure and properties of nearby debris associated with the Helmi streams, originally identified as an overdensity…
Flat rotation curves v(r) are naturally explained by elongated (prolate) Dark Matter (DM) distributions, and we have provided competitive fits to the SPARC database. To further probe the geometry of the halo one needs out-of-plane…
Using deep photometric data from CFHT/Megacam, we study the morphology and density of the GD-1 stream, one of the longest and coldest stellar streams in the Milky Way. Our deep data recovers the lower main sequence of the stream with…
We perform numerical simulations of a stellar galactic disk with initial conditions chosen to represent an unrelaxed population which might have been left following a merger. Stars are unevenly distributed in radial action angle, though the…
We study the formation of the Milky Way's halo in a $\Lambda$CDM cosmology by scaling down a high resolution simulation of the formation of a cluster of galaxies. We determine how much phase-space substructure is left over from the objects…