Related papers: The Stellar Tidal Stream Survey
Mergers and tidal interactions between massive galaxies and their dwarf satellites are a fundamental prediction of the Lambda-Cold Dark Matter cosmology. These events are thought to provide important observational diagnostics of nonlinear…
Tidal interactions between massive galaxies and their satellites are fundamental processes in a Universe with L-Cold Dark Matter cosmology, redistributing material into faint features that preserve records of past galactic interactions.…
Within the hierarchical framework for galaxy formation, merging and tidal interactions are expected to shape large galaxies to this day. While major mergers are quite rare at present, minor mergers and satellite disruptions - which result…
[Abridged] Within the hierarchical framework for galaxy formation, minor merging and tidal interactions are expected to shape all large galaxies to the present day. As a consequence, most seemingly normal disk galaxies should be surrounded…
Dwarf galaxies that come too close to larger galaxies suffer tidal disruption; the differential gravitational force between one side of the galaxy and the other serves to rip the stars from the dwarf galaxy so that they instead orbit the…
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…
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…
One of the generic predictions of modern cosmological models is that large galaxies should have experienced many mergers with smaller galaxies at some point in their past. Debris from such encounters will leave spatially distinct…
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…
According to the well established hierarchical framework for galaxy evolution, galaxies grow through mergers with other galaxies and the LambdaCDM cosmological model predicts that the stellar halos of massive galaxies are rich in remnants…
To place the highly substructured stellar halos of the Milky Way and M31 in a larger context of hierarchical galaxy formation, it is necessary to understand the prevalence and properties of tidal substructure around external galaxies. This…
The hierarchical model of galaxy formation predicts that the Milky Way halo is populated by tidal debris of dwarf galaxies and globular clusters. Due to long dynamical times, debris from the lowest mass objects remains coherent as thin and…
Several long, dynamically cold stellar streams have been observed around the Milky Way Galaxy, presumably formed from the tidal disruption of globular clusters. In integrable potentials---where all orbits are regular---tidal debris…
We use a simulation performed within the Constrained Local UniversE Simulation (CLUES) project to study a realistic Local Group-like object. We employ this group as a numerical laboratory for studying the evolution of the population of its…
The last decade has seen enormous progress in understanding the structure of the Milky Way and neighboring galaxies via the production of large-scale digital surveys of the sky like 2MASS and SDSS, as well as specialized, counterpart…
In hierarchical models of galaxy formation, stellar tidal streams are expected around most, if not all, galaxies. Although these features may provide useful diagnostics of the $\Lambda$CDM model, their observational properties remain poorly…
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…
Stellar streams -- formed from tidally stripped globular clusters or dwarf galaxies -- are sensitive tracers of a galaxy's accretion history and gravitational potential. While numerous streams are known in the Milky Way (MW), the formation…
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 Local Group is often seen to be a quiescent environment without significant merger events. However an ancient major merger may have occurred in the most massive galaxy. Numerical simulations have shown that tidal tails formed during…