Related papers: Multiple components of the Jhelum stellar stream
Stellar streams are key players in many aspects of Milky Way studies and, in particular, studying their orbital dynamics is crucial for furthering our understanding of the Milky Way's gravitational potential. Although this is not a trivial…
Simulations are run with and without a normal cold dark matter sub-halo population below 4x10^8 M_sun to examine the role of the lower mass sub-halos in the creation of density variations, "gaps", within thin tidal star streams. Dense star…
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 advent of Gaia's 2nd data release in combination with large spectroscopic surveys are revolutionizing our understanding of the Galaxy. Thanks to these and the knowledge accumulated thus far, a more mature picture of the evolution of the…
Stellar streams are dynamically fragile structures formed by the tidal disruption of dwarf galaxies and stellar clusters. These objects are valuable tracers of the gravitational potential and accretion history of the Milky Way, and are key…
We summarize evidence that the halo of the Milky Way comprises two different, and broadly overlapping, stellar components. The two structures exhibit different chemical compositions, spatial distributions, and kinematics. These results were…
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…
Stellar streams provide unique probes of galactic potentials, with the longer streams normally providing the cleaner measurements. In this paper, we show an example of a short tidal stream that is particularly sensitive to the shape of the…
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 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…
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…
We develop a framework for modelling the Milky Way using stellar streams and a wide range of photometric and kinematic observations. Through the use of mock data we demonstrate that a standard suite of Galactic observations leads to…
We present the results of fitting a flexible stellar stream density model to a collection of thirteen streams around the Milky Way, using photometric data from DES, DECaLS, and Pan-STARRS. We construct density maps for each stream and…
Stellar streams are sensitive probes of the Milky Way's gravitational potential. The mean track of a stream constrains global properties of the potential, while its fine-grained surface density constrains galactic substructure. A precise…
Detailed studies of stellar populations in the halos of the Milky Way and the Andromeda (M 31) galaxies have shown increasing numbers of tidal streams and dwarf galaxies, attesting to a complicated and on-going process of hierarchical…
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…
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 influence galaxy evolution throughout cosmic history and…
Stellar streams from disrupted globular clusters are excellent probes of dark matter (DM) subhalos. Observed Milky Way streams display a remarkable diversity of features: spurs, gaps, kinks, cocoons, and density variations, many attributed…
The Ophiuchus stellar stream is peculiar: (1) its length is short given the age of its constituent stars, and (2) several probable member stars that lie close in both sky position and velocity have dispersions in these dimensions that far…
We explore whether stellar tidal streams can provide information on the secular, cosmological evolution of the Milky Way's gravitational potential and on the presence of subhalos. We carry out long-term (~t_hubble) N-body simulations of…