Related papers: Stellar streams and dark substructure: the diffusi…
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…
Cosmological structure formation predicts that our galactic halo contains an enormous hierarchy of substructures and streams, the remnants of the merging hierarchy that began with tiny Earth mass microhalos. If these structures persist…
We present a model for the interaction of the GD-1 stellar stream with a massive perturber that naturally explains many of the observed stream features, including a gap and an off-stream spur of stars. The model involves an impulse by a…
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…
In the coming decade, thousands of stellar streams will be observed in the halos of external galaxies. What fundamental discoveries will we make about dark matter from these streams? As a first attempt to look at these questions, we model…
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…
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,…
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.…
Thin stellar streams, such as those resulting from the tidal disruption of globular clusters, have long been known and used as probes of the gravitational potential of our Galaxy, both its visible and dark contents. In particular, the…
The density variations in thin stellar streams may encode important information on the nature of the dark matter. For instance, if dark matter aggregates into massive sub-halos, these perturbers are expected to scatter stars out of…
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…
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…
In this work, we explore the idea that substructures like stellar clusters could be formed from the tidal stream produced in galactic minor mergers. We use $N$-body and SPH simulations of satellite galaxies interacting with a larger galaxy.…
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…
We use numerical simulations to examine the substructure within galactic and cluster mass halos that form within a hierarchical universe. Clusters are easily reproduced with a steep mass spectrum of thousands of substructure clumps that…
In cold dark matter cosmological models, structures form and grow by merging of smaller units. Numerical simulations have shown that such merging is incomplete; the inner cores of halos survive and orbit as "subhalos" within their hosts.…
The local stellar halo of the Milky Way contains the debris from several past accretion events. Here we study in detail the structure and properties of nearby debris associated with the Helmi streams, originally identified as an overdensity…
We study the effect of dynamical friction on globular clusters and on the stars evaporated from the globular clusters (stellar streams) moving in a galactic halo. Due to dynamical friction, the position of a globular cluster (GC) as a…
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…
Dynamically cold stellar streams are ideal probes of the gravitational field of the Milky Way. This paper re-examines the question of how such streams might be used to test for the presence of "missing satellites" -the many thousands of…