Related papers: Detecting the Figure Rotation of Dark Matter Halos…
We have analyzed galaxy and group-sized dark matter halos formed in a high resolution LCDM numerical N-body simulation in order to study the rotation of the triaxial figure, a property in principle independent of the angular momentum of the…
Observations of the lengthy tidal streams produced by the destruction of the Sagittarius dwarf spheroidal (Sgr dSph) are capable of providing strong constraints on the shape of the Galactic gravitational potential. However, previous work,…
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…
Assuming the dark matter halo of the Milky Way as a non-spherical potential (i.e. triaxial, prolate, oblate), we show how the assembling process of the Milky Way halo, may have left long lasting stellar halo kinematic fossils only due to…
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…
Recent studies have suggested that the Milky Way (MW)'s Dark Matter (DM) halo may be significantly tilted with respect to its central stellar disk, a feature that might be linked to its formation history. In this work, we demonstrate a…
Recent analyses of the stellar stream of the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy have claimed that the kinematics and three-dimensional location of the M-giant stars in this structure constrain the dark matter halo of our Galaxy to possess a triaxial…
Stars and their kinematics provide one of the tools available for studies of the shapes of galaxies and their halos. In this review I focus on two specific applications: the shape of the Milky Way dark halo and the shape of the LMC disk.…
We investigate the figure rotation of dark matter halos identified in Lambda CDM simulations. We find that when strict criteria are used to select suitable halos for study, 5 of the 222 halos identified in our z=0 simulation output undergo…
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…
We analyze self-consistent N-body simulations of the Milky Way disk and the ongoing disruption of the Sagittarius dwarf satellite to study the effect of Sagittarius tidal debris on dark matter detection experiments. In agreement with…
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…
Collisionless dark matter galactic halos are expected to exhibit damped oscillations as a result of ongoing late time accretion. An n-body model of the cosmological assembly of a Milky Way-like halo is used to quantify the time dependence…
The dark matter subhalos orbiting in a galactic halo perturb the orbits of stars in thin stellar streams. Over time the random velocities in the streams develop non-Gaussian wings. The rate of velocity increase is approximately a random…
We analyze the Aquarius simulations to characterize the shape of dark matter halos with peak circular velocity in the range 8<Vmax<200 km/s, and perform a convergence study using the various Aquarius resolution levels. For the converged…
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…
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…
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…
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…
The dwarf galaxies orbiting a main galaxy suffer strong tidal forces produced by its dark halo. As a consequence, substructures and tidal tails could appear in the satellites. These structures could give us information about the dark matter…