Related papers: Building an Acceleration Ladder with Tidal Streams…
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…
Tidal streams don't, in general, delineate orbits. A stream-orbit misalignment is expected to lead to biases when using orbit-fitting to constrain models for the Galactic potential. In this first of two papers we discuss the expected…
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…
Stellar streams result from the tidal disruption of satellites and star clusters as they orbit a host galaxy, and can be very sensitive probes of the gravitational potential of the host system. We select and study narrow stellar streams…
In this paper, we present a holistic view of the detection, characterization, and origin of stellar streams in the disk of a simulated Milky Way-like galaxy. The star-by-star simulation of the Galaxy evolves stars born in clusters in a…
We present two spectroscopic surveys of the tidal stellar stream of the Palomar 5 globular cluster, undertaken with the VLT/FLAMES and AAT/AAOmega instruments. We use these data in conjunction with photometric data presented in the previous…
Mergers and tidal interactions between massive galaxies and their dwarf satellites are a fundamental prediction of the Lambda-Cold Dark Matter cosmology. These events are thought to provide important observational diagnostics of nonlinear…
The temporal stability of millisecond pulsars is remarkable, rivaling even some terrestrial atomic clocks at long timescales. Using this property, we show that millisecond pulsars distributed in the galactic neighborhood form an ensemble of…
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…
Within the hierarchical framework for galaxy formation, merging and tidal interactions are expected to shape large galaxies to this day. While major mergers are quite rare at present, minor mergers and satellite disruptions - which result…
Thin stellar streams, formed from the tidal disruption of globular clusters, are important gravitational tools, sensitive to both global and small-scale properties of dark matter. The Palomar 5 stellar stream (Pal 5) is an exemplar stream…
The stellar velocity fields of elliptical galaxies hold clues to their dynamical structure and origin. The construction of velocity field models is greatly simplified by assuming an approximate geometrical form for the streamlines of the…
Stellar streams are excellent probes of the gravitational potential in which they evolve. In the Milky Way (MW), globular cluster (GC) streams are routinely used to infer properties about time-dependent perturbations of the underlying…
When a subhalo interacts with a cold stellar stream it perturbs its otherwise nearly smooth distribution of stars, and this leads to the creation of a gap. The properties of such gaps depend on the parameters of the interaction. Their…
We show that a small, but \textit{measurable} shift in the eclipse mid-point time of eclipsing binary (EBs) stars of $\sim$ 0.1 seconds over a decade baseline can be used to directly measure the Galactic acceleration of stars in the Milky…
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…
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…
The launching of up to four astrometric missions in the next decade will enable us to make measurements of stars in tidal streamers from Galactic satellites of sufficient accuracy to place strong constraints on the mass distribution in the…
We present a generative probabilistic model for a tidal stream and demonstrate how this model is used to constrain the Galactic potential. The model takes advantage of the simple structure of a stream in angle and frequency space for the…
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…