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Tidal streams are a powerful probe of the Milky Way (MW) potential shape. In this paper, we introduce a simple test particle method to fit stream data, using a Markov Chain Monte Carlo technique to marginalise over uncertainties in the…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2015-06-16 H. Lux , J. I. Read , G. Lake , K. V. Johnston

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.…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2022-05-18 M. Sten Delos , Fabian Schmidt

Only in the Milky Way is it possible to conduct an experiment which uses stellar streams to detect low-mass dark matter subhaloes. In smooth and static host potentials, tidal tails of disrupting satellites appear highly symmetric. However,…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2017-06-28 Denis Erkal , Sergey E. Koposov , Vasily Belokurov

The Gaia mission has provided precise astrometry and spectrophotometry for billions of stars in the Milky Way, enabling the identification and kinematic characterization of stellar streams. These streams, remnants of disrupted globular…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2026-05-21 Claire S. Ye , Raymond G. Carlberg

We analyze stellar streams in action-angle coordinates combined with recent local direct acceleration measurements to provide joint constraints on the potential of our Galaxy. Our stream analysis uses the Kullback-Leibler divergence with a…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2023-05-08 Peter Craig , Sukanya Chakrabarti , Robyn E. Sanderson , Farnik Nikakhtar

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

Stellar streams -- formed from tidally stripped globular clusters or dwarf galaxies -- are sensitive tracers of a galaxy's accretion history and gravitational potential. While numerous streams are known in the Milky Way (MW), the formation…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2025-05-22 Sachi Weerasooriya , Tjitske Starkenburg , Emily C. Cunningham , Kathryn V Johnston

We use ESA/Gaia astrometry together with SEGUE and LAMOST measurements of the GD-1 stellar stream to explore the improvement on the Galactic gravitational potential that these new data provide. Assuming a realistic universal model for the…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2019-04-24 Khyati Malhan , Rodrigo A. Ibata

In the first of these two papers we demonstrated that assuming streams delineate orbits can lead to order one errors in potential parameters for realistic Galactic potentials. Motivated by the need for an improvement on orbit-fitting, we…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2014-04-24 Jason L. Sanders , James Binney

We present an approach to measure the Milky Way (MW) potential using the angular accelerations of stars in aggregate as measured by astrometric surveys like Gaia. Accelerations directly probe the gradient of the MW potential, as opposed to…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2021-12-22 Malte Buschmann , Benjamin R. Safdi , Katelin Schutz

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…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2015-06-22 Ana Bonaca , Marla Geha , Andreas H. W. Kuepper , Juerg Diemand , Kathryn V. Johnston , David W. Hogg

The morphology of thin stellar streams can be used to test the nature of dark matter. It is therefore crucial to extend searches for globular cluster streams to other galaxies than the Milky Way. In this paper, we investigate the current…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2019-10-02 Sarah Pearson , Tjitske K. Starkenburg , Kathryn V. Johnston , Benjamin F. Williams , Rodrigo A. Ibata

The GD-1 stream is one of the longest and coldest stellar streams discovered to date, and one of the best objects for constraining the dark matter properties of the Milky Way. Using data from {\it Gaia} DR2 we study the proper motions,…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2020-04-15 T. J. L. de Boer , D. Erkal , M. Gieles

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…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2018-11-02 Kohei Hattori , Denis Erkal , Jason L. Sanders

Recent observations have revealed a trove of unexpected morphological features in many of the Milky Way's stellar streams. Explanations for such features include time-dependent deformations of the Galactic gravitational potential, local…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2022-12-22 Tomer D. Yavetz , Kathryn V. Johnston , Sarah Pearson , Adrian M. Price-Whelan , Chris Hamilton

Stellar tidal streams are a key tracer of galaxy evolution and have the potential to provide an indirect means for tracing dark matter. For the Local Group, many diffuse substructures have been identified and their link to galaxy evolution…

We cross-match high-precision astrometric data from Gaia DR2 with accurate multi-band photometry from the Dark Energy Survey (DES) DR1 to confidently measure proper motions for nine stellar streams in the DES footprint: Aliqa Uma, ATLAS,…

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…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2025-02-24 Daniel Roberts , Mark Gieles , Denis Erkal , Jason L. Sanders

The narrow GD-1 stream of stars, spanning 60 deg on the sky at a distance of ~10 kpc from the Sun and ~15 kpc from the Galactic center, is presumed to be debris from a tidally disrupted star cluster that traces out a test-particle orbit in…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2010-03-04 Sergey E. Koposov , Hans-Walter Rix , David W. Hogg