Related papers: Stream on: Evolution of stellar shells and streams…
Nearly a hundred progenitor-less, thin stellar streams have been discovered in the Milky Way, thanks to Gaia and related surveys. Most streams are believed to have formed from star clusters and it was recently proposed that extended star…
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…
The cold dark matter picture predicts an abundance of substructure within the Galactic halo. However, most substructures host no stars and can only be detected indirectly. Stellar streams present a promising probe of this dark substructure.…
In hierarchical models of galaxy formation, stellar tidal streams are expected around most, if not all, galaxies. Although these features may provide useful diagnostics of the $\Lambda$CDM model, their observational properties remain poorly…
Stellar shells are low surface brightness features, created during nearly head-on galaxy mergers from the debris of the tidally disrupted satellite. Here, we investigate the formation and evolution mechanism of shells in six dimensions (3d…
Published maps of red giant stars in the halo region of M31 exhibit a giant stellar stream to the south of this galaxy, as well as a giant "shelf" to the northeast of M31's center. Using these maps, we find that there is a fainter shelf of…
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…
Most formation scenarios of globular clusters assume a molecular cloud as the progenitor of the stellar system. However, it is still unclear, how this cloud is transformed into a star cluster, i.e. how the destructive processes related to…
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…
According to the well established hierarchical framework for galaxy evolution, galaxies grow through mergers with other galaxies and the LambdaCDM cosmological model predicts that the stellar halos of massive galaxies are rich in remnants…
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…
We investigate the possibility that the recently discovered Hercules Milky Way satellite is in fact a stellar stream in formation, thereby explaining its very elongated shape with an axis ratio of 3 to 1. Under the assumption that Hercules…
The origins of most stellar streams in the Milky Way are unknown. With improved proper motions provided by Gaia EDR3, we show that the orbits of 23 Galactic stellar streams are highly clustered in orbital phase space. Based on their…
We present the results of fitting a flexible stellar stream density model to a collection of thirteen streams around the Milky Way, using photometric data from DES, DECaLS, and Pan-STARRS. We construct density maps for each stream and…
The last 10-20 years has seen a profound shift in views of how the Galaxy's halo formed. The idea of a monolithic early collapse of a single system (Eggen, Lynden-Bell and Sandage 1962) has been challenged by observations at high redshift…
In simple models of the Milky Way, tidally disrupting satellites produce long and thin---nearly one-dimensional---stellar streams. Using astrometric data from the Gaia second data release and photometry from the Dark Energy Survey, we…
The dynamics of stellar streams in rotating barred potentials is explained for the first time. Naturally, neighbouring stream stars reach pericentre at slightly different times. In the presence of a rotating bar, these neighbouring stream…
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…
We present surface photometry of a very faint, giant arc feature in the halo of the nearby spiral galaxy NGC 5055 (M63) that is consistent with being a part of a stellar stream resulting from the disruption of a dwarf satellite galaxy. This…
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…