Related papers: Effects of chaos on the detectability of stellar s…
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…
The cold dark matter picture predicts an abundance of substructure within the Galactic halo. However, most substructures host no stars and can only be detected indirectly. Stellar streams present a promising probe of this dark substructure.…
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…
Simulations of tidal streams show that close encounters with dark matter subhalos induce density gaps and distortions in on-sky path along the streams. Accordingly, observing disrupted streams in the Galactic halo would substantiate the…
Thin halo star streams originate from the evaporation of globular clusters and therefore provide information about the early epoch globular cluster population. The observed tidal tails from halo globular clusters in the Milky Way are much…
Recent years have seen the discovery of an ever growing number of stellar debris streams and clouds. These structures are typically detected as extended and often curvilinear overdensities of metal-poor stars that stand out from the…
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…
Most massive galaxies are thought to contain a supermassive black hole in their centre surrounded by a tenuous gas environment, leading to no significant emission. In these quiescent galaxies, tidal disruption events represent a powerful…
Many Local Group dwarf spheroidal galaxies are found in the Galactic halo along great circles in the sky. Some of these stellar systems are thought to be the fragments of larger parent galaxies which have once intruded into and were torn…
When a massive object crosses a star stream velocity changes are induced both along and transverse to the stream which can lead to the development of a visible gap. For a stream narrow relative to its orbital radius the time of stream…
We show that diffusion due to chaotic mixing in the Neighbourhood of the Sun may not be as relevant as previously suggested in erasing phase space signatures of past Galactic accretion events. For this purpose, we analyse Solar…
We study numerical simulations of satellite galaxy disruption in a potential resembling that of the Milky Way. Our goal is to assess whether a merger origin for the stellar halo would leave observable fossil structure in the phase-space…
Star streams in galactic halos are long, thin, unbound structures that will be disturbed by the thousands dark matter sub-halos that are predicted to be orbiting within the main halo. A sub-halo generally induces a localized wave in the…
We use the very high resolution, fully cosmological simulations from the Aquarius project, coupled to a semi-analytical model of galaxy formation, to study the phase-space distribution of halo stars in "solar neighbourhood"-like volumes. We…
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.…
In this work, we study how the abundance and dynamics of populations of disrupting satellite galaxies change systematically as a function of host galaxy properties. We apply a theoretical model of the phase-mixing process to classify intact…
In a previous paper based on dark matter only simulations we show that, in the approximation of an analytic and static potential describing the strongly triaxial and cuspy shape of Milky Way-sized haloes, diffusion due to chaotic mixing in…
Tidal stellar shells and streams are two of the most intriguing low-surface-brightness features within galaxies, consisting of stars accreted from satellite galaxies. A crucial ingredient in determining which type of feature will be formed…
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…
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…