Related papers: Tracing Galaxy Formation with Stellar Halos I: Met…
If the favored hierarchical cosmological model is correct, then the Milky Way system should have accreted and subsequently tidally destroyed ~100 low-mass galaxies in the past ~12 Gyr. We model this process using a hybrid semi-analytic plus…
We use a series of high-resolution N-body simulations of a `Milky-Way' halo, coupled to semi-analytic techniques, to study the formation of our own Galaxy and of its stellar halo. Our model Milky Way galaxy is a relatively young system…
We use a series of high-resolution simulations of a `Milky-Way' halo coupled to semi-analytic methods to study the formation of our own Galaxy and of its stellar halo. The physical properties of our model Milky Way, as well as the age and…
In the $\Lambda$-Cold Dark Matter model of the Universe, galaxies form in part through accreting satellite systems. Previous work have built an understanding of the signatures of these processes contained within galactic stellar halos. This…
In the $\Lambda$CDM paradigm, stellar halos form through the accretion and disruption of satellite galaxies. We introduce new semi-analytic modeling within the SatGen framework to track the ex-situ stellar components of Milky Way--like…
We have used data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) Data Release 5 to explore the overall structure and substructure of the stellar halo of the Milky Way using about 4 million color-selected main sequence turn-off stars. We fit…
This paper explores the mapping between the observable properties of a stellar halo in phase- and abundance-space and the parent galaxy's accretion history in terms of the characteristic epoch of accretion and mass and orbits of progenitor…
The satellites of the Milky Way and Andromeda represent the smallest galaxies we can observe in our Universe. In this series of papers we aim to shed light on their formation and evolution using cosmological hydrodynamical simulations. In…
The present day chemical and dynamical properties of the Milky Way bear the imprint of the Galaxy's formation and evolutionary history. One of the most enduring and critical debates surrounding Galactic evolution is that regarding the…
We find that the relative contribution of satellite galaxies accreted at high redshift to the stellar population of the Milky Way's smooth halo increases with distance, becoming observable relative to the classical smooth halo about 15 kpc…
We present six simulations of galactic stellar haloes formed by the tidal disruption of accreted dwarf galaxies in a fully cosmological setting. Our model is based on the Aquarius project, a suite of high resolution N-body simulations of…
We present a cosmologically motivated model for the hierachical formation of the stellar halo which includes a semi-analytic treatment of galactic chemical enrichment coupled to numerical simulations that track the orbital evolution and…
We examine the accretion and merger histories of central and satellite galaxies in a smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) cosmological simulation that resolves galaxies down to 7e9 M[Sun]. Most friends-of-friends halos in the simulation…
We study numerical simulations of satellite galaxy disruption in a potential resembling that of the Milky Way. Our goal is to assess whether a merger origin for the stellar halo would leave observable fossil structure in the phase-space…
[Abridged] Motivated by upcoming data from astrometric and spectroscopic surveys of the Galaxy, we explore the chemical abundance properties and phase-space distributions in hierarchically-formed stellar halo simulations set in a LambdaCDM…
We develop an explicit model for the formation of the stellar halo from tidally disrupted, accreted dwarf satellites in the cold dark matter (CDM) framework, focusing on predictions testable with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) and…
We investigate the formation of the stellar halos of four simulated disk galaxies using high resolution, cosmological SPH + N-Body simulations. These simulations include a self-consistent treatment of all the major physical processes…
If the Galaxy formed hierarchically through the accretion of smaller satellite galaxies we might hope to find signatures of this in the halo's phase-space distribution. I review theoretical ideas about what form these signatures should…
We use a particle tagging technique to dynamically populate the N-body Via Lactea II high-resolution simulation with stars. The method is calibrated using the observed luminosity function of Milky Way satellites and the concentration of…
Theory and observations agree that the accreted stellar halos (ASHs) of Milky Way-like galaxies display significant scatter. I take advantage of this stochasticity to invert the link between halo assembly history (HAH) and ASH, using mock…