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The last 10-20 years has seen a profound shift in views of how the Galaxy's halo formed. The idea of a monolithic early collapse of a single system (Eggen, Lynden-Bell and Sandage 1962) has been challenged by observations at high redshift…

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…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2015-06-19 Adrian M. Price-Whelan , David W. Hogg , Kathryn V. Johnston , David Hendel

Tidal features from galaxy mergers, particularly stellar streams, offer valuable insights into galaxy assembly and dark matter halo properties. This paper aims to identify a large sample of nearby stellar streams suitable for detailed…

The velocity, position, and action variable evolution of a tidal stream drawn out of a star cluster in a triaxial isochrone potential containing a sub-halo population reproduces many of the orbital effects of more general cosmological halos…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2015-08-06 Raymond G. Carlberg

The Galaxy's stellar halo seems to be a tangle of disrupted systems that have been tidally stretched out into streams. Each stream approximately delineates an orbit in the Galactic force-field. In the first paper in this series we showed…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2009-10-24 Andy Eyre , James Binney

We report the discovery of a narrow stellar stream crossing the constellations of Sculptor and Fornax in the Southern celestial hemisphere. The portion of the stream detected in the Data Release 1 photometry of the ATLAS survey is at least…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2015-06-19 S. E. Koposov , M. Irwin , V. Belokurov , E. Gonzales-Solares , A. Kupcu Yoldas , J. Lewis , N. Metcalfe , T. Shanks

We present the first and so far the only simulations to follow the fine-grained phase-space structure of galaxy haloes formed from generic LCDM initial conditions. We integrate the geodesic deviation equation in tandem with the N-body…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2015-05-18 Mark Vogelsberger , Simon D. M. White

The Gaia mission has provided precise astrometry and spectrophotometry for billions of stars in the Milky Way, enabling the identification and kinematic characterization of stellar streams. These streams, remnants of disrupted globular…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2026-05-21 Claire S. Ye , Raymond G. Carlberg

We simulate the tidal disruption of a collisionless N-body globular star cluster in a total of 300 different orbits selected to have galactocentric radii between 10 and 30 kpc in four dark matter halos: (a) a spherical halo with no…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2016-03-09 Wayne Ngan , Raymond G. Carlberg , Brandon Bozek , Rosemary F. G. Wyse , Alexander S. Szalay , Piero Madau

We study the dynamics of faint stellar substructures around the Umbrella Galaxy, NGC 4651, which hosts a dramatic system of streams and shells formed through the tidal disruption of a nucleated dwarf elliptical galaxy. We elucidate the…

The phase space of stellar streams is proposed to detect dark substructure in the Milky Way through the perturbations created by passing subhalos - and thus is a powerful test of the cold dark matter paradigm and its alternatives. Using…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2025-07-16 Peter Xiangyuan Ma , Keir K. Rogers , Ting S. Li , Renée Hložek , Jeremy Webb , Ruth Huang , Julian Meunier

In this contribution we discuss the expected properties of our halo if our Galaxy had been built from mergers of smaller systems. Using both analytic arguments and high-resolution simulations, we find that the Galactic halo in the Solar…

Astrophysics · Physics 2007-05-23 Amina Helmi

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…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2015-06-22 Ana Bonaca , Marla Geha , Andreas H. W. Kuepper , Juerg Diemand , Kathryn V. Johnston , David W. Hogg

We present a Field of Streams visualizing stellar structures in the Milky Way halo as viewed by the Dark Energy Camera (DECam). We use $g$- and $r$-band imaging from the Dark Energy Survey and the DECam Legacy Survey, covering $18{,}700…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2025-06-09 Peter Ferguson , Nora Shipp

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…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2018-06-06 Sownak Bose , Idan Ginsburg , Abraham Loeb

The origins of most stellar streams in the Milky Way are unknown. With improved proper motions provided by Gaia EDR3, we show that the orbits of 23 Galactic stellar streams are highly clustered in orbital phase space. Based on their…

Thin stellar streams, formed from the tidal disruption of globular clusters, are important gravitational tools, sensitive to both global and small-scale properties of dark matter. The Palomar 5 stellar stream (Pal 5) is an exemplar stream…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2020-02-06 Adrian M. Price-Whelan , Cecilia Mateu , Giuliano Iorio , Sarah Pearson , Ana Bonaca , Vasily Belokurov

The halo of the Milky Way has long been hypothesized to harbour significant amounts of merger debris. This view has been supported over more than a decade by wide-field photometric surveys which have revealed the outer halo to be lumpy. The…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2019-05-01 Helmer H. Koppelman , Amina Helmi , Davide Massari , Sebastian Roelenga , Ulrich Bastian

During the past 20 years, numerous stellar streams have been discovered in both the Milky Way and the Local Group. These streams have been tidally torn from orbiting systems, which suggests that most of them should roughly trace the orbit…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2013-01-18 Daniele S. M. Fantin

In the cold dark matter paradigm, our Galaxy is predicted to contain >10000 dark matter subhaloes in the $10^5-10^8M_\odot$ range which should be completely devoid of stars. Stellar streams are sensitive to the presence of these subhaloes,…