Related papers: Measuring Fundamental Galactic Parameters with Ste…
Satellite galaxies endure powerful environmental tidal forces that drive mass stripping of their outer regions. Consequently, satellites located in central regions of galaxy clusters or groups, where the tidal field is strongest, are…
Tidal debris from Galactic satellites generally forms one-dimensional elongated streams, since nearby Galactic orbits have almost identical frequency ratios. We show that the situation is different for orbits close to the Galactic disc,…
Tidal debris streams from galaxy satellites can provide insight into the dark matter distribution in halos. This is because we have more information about stars in a debris structure than about a purely random population of stars: we know…
The dark matter halo of the Milky Way is expected to be triaxial and filled with substructure. It is hoped that streams or shells of stars produced by tidal disruption of stellar systems will provide precise measures of the gravitational…
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…
We present preliminary results of a long-term project to investigate the process of accretion and tidal disruption of dSph satellites in the Galactic halo and, in particular, to search for new tidal tails in a sample of nearby dSph…
The Gaia mission promises to deliver precision astrometry at an unprecedented level, heralding a new era for discerning the kinematic and spatial coordinates of stars in our Galaxy. Here, we present a new technique for estimating the age of…
Observations of the lengthy tidal streams produced by the destruction of the Sagittarius dwarf spheroidal (Sgr dSph) are capable of providing strong constraints on the shape of the Galactic gravitational potential. However, previous work,…
The unique dynamics of the tidal disruption of satellite galaxies is an extremely sensitive probe of long-range interactions between dark-matter particles. Dark-matter forces that are several percent the strength of gravity will lead to…
Stellar streams provide unique probes of galactic potentials, with the longer streams normally providing the cleaner measurements. In this paper, we show an example of a short tidal stream that is particularly sensitive to the shape of the…
[Abridged] Within the hierarchical framework for galaxy formation, minor merging and tidal interactions are expected to shape all large galaxies to the present day. As a consequence, most seemingly normal disk galaxies should be surrounded…
The main aim of this paper is to report two new detections of tidal debris in the northern stream of the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy located at 45 arcdeg and 55 arcdeg from the center of galaxy. Our observational approach is based on deep…
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…
The Gaia astrometric mission may offer an unprecedented opportunity to discover new tidal streams in the Galactic halo. To test this, we apply nGC3, a great-circle-cell count method that combines position and proper motion data to identify…
Tidal streams of globular clusters are ideal tracers of the Galactic gravitational potential. Compared to the few known, complex and diffuse dwarf-galaxy streams, they are kinematically cold, have thin morphologies and are abundant in the…
A new overdensity of A-colored stars in distant parts of the Milky Way's stellar halo, at a dereddened SDSS magnitude of g_0 = 20.3, is presented. Identification of associated variable RR Lyrae candidates supports the claim that these are…
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…
Recent years have seen the discovery of an ever growing number of stellar debris streams and clouds. These structures are typically detected as extended and often curvilinear overdensities of metal-poor stars that stand out from the…
We present the analysis of 1,207 RR Lyrae found in photometry taken by the Catalina Survey's Mount Lemmon telescope. By combining accurate distances for these stars with measurements for ~14,000 type-AB RR Lyrae from the Catalina Schmid…
A sufficiently extended satellite in the tidal field of a host galaxy loses mass to create nearly symmetric leading and trailing tidal streams. We study the case in which tidal heating drives mass loss from a low mass satellite. The stream…