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Stellar streams, the debris of tidally disrupted satellites, trace their host's gravitational potential and thus probe dark matter halo structure. While six-dimensional phase-space data of Galactic streams enable precise dark matter halo…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2026-01-27 David Chemaly , Elisabeth Sola , Vasily Belokurov , Sergey Koposov , GyuChul Meyong , HanYuan Zhang , Denis Erkal

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…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2014-03-05 Nathan Deg , Lawrence Widrow

We present a brief history of Galactic astrophysics, and explain the origin of halo substructure in the Galaxy. We motivate our study of tidal streams by highlighting the tight constraints that analysis of the trajectories of tidal streams…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2010-10-19 Andy Eyre

The circular speed curve of the Milky Way provides a key constraint on its mass distribution, reflecting the axisymmetric component of the gravitational potential. This is especially critical in the inner Galaxy ($R \lesssim 4$ kpc), where…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2025-07-18 Junichi Baba

Stellar streams are sensitive tracers of the gravitational potential, which is typically assumed to be static in the inner Galaxy. However, massive mergers like Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus can impart torques on the stellar disk of the Milky Way…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2023-12-18 Jacob Nibauer , Ana Bonaca , Mariangela Lisanti , Denis Erkal , Zoe Hastings

Tidal streams provide a powerful tool by means of which the matter distribution of the dark matter halos of their host galaxies can be studied. However, the analysis is not straightforward because streams do not delineate orbits, and for…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2015-05-28 Anjali Varghese , Rodrigo A. Ibata , Geraint F. Lewis

Tidal streams of globular clusters are ideal tracers of the Galactic gravitational potential. Compared to the few known, complex and diffuse dwarf-galaxy streams, they are kinematically cold, have thin morphologies and are abundant in the…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2016-09-07 A. H. W. Küpper , E. Balbinot , A. Bonaca , K. V. Johnston , D. W. Hogg , P. Kroupa , B. X. Santiago

Cold stellar streams---produced by tidal disruptions of clusters---are long-lived, coherent dynamical features in the halo of the Milky Way. Due to their different ages and different positions in phase space, different streams tell us…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2018-11-14 Ana Bonaca , David W. Hogg

The majority of discovered exoplanets have been observed orbiting field stars as opposed to within a star cluster. To determine whether the lack of observed exoplanets in star clusters is due to gravitational perturbations or observational…

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics · Physics 2026-05-08 Jeremy J. Webb , Milica Ivetic , Maxwell X. Cai , Simon Portegies Zwart , Daniella Morrone

We apply the automatic stellar stream detection algorithm StarStream to Gaia Data Release 3 and identify 87 stellar streams associated with Galactic globular clusters (GCs), including 34 high-quality cases with median completeness and…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2026-03-02 Yingtian Chen , Oleg Y. Gnedin , Adrian M. Price-Whelan

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…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2017-03-29 Raymond G. Carlberg

We investigate the non-adiabatic effect of time-dependent deformations in the Milky Way (MW) halo potential on stellar streams. Specifically, we consider the MW's response to the infall of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) and how this…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2024-06-25 Richard A. N. Brooks , Jason L. Sanders , Sophia Lilleengen , Michael S. Petersen , Andrew Pontzen

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…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2026-04-17 Johannes Stoiber , Lucas M. Valenzuela , Rhea-Silvia Remus , Klaus Dolag

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…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2023-11-29 Nathaniel Starkman , Jacob Nibauer , Jo Bovy , Jeremy J. Webb , Kiyan Tavangar , Adrian Price-Whelan , Ana Bonaca

The positions and velocities of stellar streams have been used to constrain the mass and shape of the Milky Way's dark matter halo. Several extragalactic streams have already been detected, though it has remained unclear what can be…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2023-09-21 Jacob Nibauer , Ana Bonaca , Kathryn V. Johnston

Using hydrodynamical simulations, we study how well the underlying gravitational potential of a galaxy cluster can be modelled dynamically with different types of tracers. In order to segregate different systematics and the effects of…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2021-06-30 Qingyang Li , Jiaxin Han , Wenting Wang , Weiguang Cui , Zhaozhou Li , Xiaohu Yang

In this paper we discuss a method for the generation of mock tidal streams. Using an ensemble of simulations in an isochrone potential where the actions and frequencies are known, we derive an empirical recipe for the evolving satellite…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2015-07-15 Mark A. Fardal , Shuiyao Huang , Martin D. Weinberg

Dynamically cold stellar streams from tidally dissolved globular clusters (GCs) serve as excellent tools to measure the Galactic mass distribution and show promise to probe the nature of dark matter. For successful application of these…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2026-03-30 Colin Holm-Hansen , Yingtian Chen , Oleg Y. Gnedin

We present the first and so far the only simulations to follow the fine-grained phase-space structure of galaxy haloes formed from generic LCDM initial conditions. We integrate the geodesic deviation equation in tandem with the N-body…

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics · Physics 2015-05-18 Mark Vogelsberger , Simon D. M. White

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,…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2015-05-14 David R. Law , Steven R. Majewski , Kathryn V. Johnston