Related papers: Orbital phase-driven biases in Galactic mass const…
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…
In the coming decade the Gaia satellite will precisely measure the positions and velocities of millions of stars in the Galactic halo, including stars in many tidal streams. These streams, the products of hierarchical accretion of satellite…
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…
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…
Recent years have seen the discovery of many tidal streams through the Galaxy. Relatively straightforward observations of a stream allow one to deduce three phase-space coordinates of an orbit. An algorithm is presented that reconstructs…
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…
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…
We present an analysis of the mechanics of thin streams, which are formed following the tidal disruption of cold, low-mass clusters in the potential of a massive host galaxy. The analysis makes extensive use of action-angle variables, in…
We describe a technique that finds orbits through the Galaxy that are consistent with measurements of a tidal stream, taking into account the extent that tidal streams do not precisely delineate orbits. We show that if accurate…
Flattened axisymmetric galactic potentials are known to host minor orbit families surrounding orbits with commensurable frequencies. The behavior of orbits that belong to these orbit families is fundamentally different than that of typical…
Co-moving groups of stars (streams) are well known in the velocity space of the disc near the Sun. Many are thought to arise from resonances with the Galactic bar or spiral arms. In this work, we search for similar moving groups in the…
Recent maps of the halo using RR Lyrae from Pan-STARRS1 have clearly depicted the spatial structure of the Sagittarius stream. These maps show the leading and trailing stream apocenters differ in galactocentric radius by a factor of two,…
We present the first detailed study comparing the populations of stellar streams in cosmological simulations to observed Milky Way dwarf galaxy streams. In particular, we compare streams identified around Milky Way analogs in the FIRE-2…
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…
Next-generation surveys are expected to uncover thousands of globular cluster (GC) stellar streams, motivating the need for a theoretical framework that produces realistic GC streams in a fully cosmological, Milky Way-like environment. We…
Stellar streams trace the gravitational potential of their host galaxies and offer a direct probe of dark matter halo geometry. Cosmological simulations predict that halo shapes depend on both baryonic physics and the nature of dark matter,…
Extended halo tidal streams from disrupting Milky Way satellites offer new opportunities for gauging fundamental Galactic parameters without challenging observations of the Galactic center. In the roughly spherical Galactic potential tidal…
Observations show that stellar streams originating in satellite dwarf galaxies are frequent in the Universe. While such events are predicted by theory, it is not clear how many of the streams that are generated are washed out afterwards to…
Stellar streams retain a memory of their gravitational interactions with small-scale perturbations. While perturbative models for streams have been formulated in action-angle coordinates, a direct transformation to these coordinates is only…
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…