Related papers: Tidal Streams as Probes of the Galactic Potential
Motivated by recent observations of the Sagittarius stream, we devise a rapid algorithm to generate faithful representations of the centroids of stellar tidal streams formed in a disruption of a progenitor of an arbitrary mass in an…
Tidal interactions between massive galaxies and their satellites are fundamental processes in a Universe with L-Cold Dark Matter cosmology, redistributing material into faint features that preserve records of past galactic interactions.…
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 develop statistical methods for identifying star streams in the halo of the Milky Way galaxy that exploit observed spatial and radial velocity distributions. Within a great circle, departures of the observed spatial distribution from…
The extensive span of the Sagittarius (Sgr) stream makes it a promising tool for studying the Milky Way gravitational potential. Characterizing its stellar kinematics can constrain halo properties and provide a benchmark for the Cold Dark…
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…
We explore whether stellar tidal streams can provide information on the secular, cosmological evolution of the Milky Way's gravitational potential and on the presence of subhalos. We carry out long-term (~t_hubble) N-body simulations of…
Stream stars removed by tides from their progenitor satellite galaxy or globular cluster act as a group of test particles on neighboring orbits, probing the gravitational field of the Milky Way. While constraints from individual streams…
ESA's Global Astrometric Interferometer for Astrophysics (GAIA) holds the promise of mapping out the detailed phase space structure of the Galactic halo by providing unprecedented annual proper motion and parallax of $1-10\muas$ astrometric…
We present a new method for constraining the Milky Way halo gravitational potential by simultaneously fitting multiple tidal streams. This method requires full three-dimensional positions and velocities for all stars to be fit, but does not…
We discuss how to use tidal streams from globular clusters to measure the mass distribution of the Milky Way. Recent proper motion determinations for globular clusters from plate measurements and Hipparcos astrometry provide several good…
We address the problem of identifying remnants of satellite galaxies in the halo of our galaxy with Gaia data. The remnants have to be extracted from a very large data set (of order 10^9 stars) in the presence of observational errors and…
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…
Dwarf galaxies that come too close to larger galaxies suffer tidal disruption; the differential gravitational force between one side of the galaxy and the other serves to rip the stars from the dwarf galaxy so that they instead orbit the…
We develop a framework for modelling the Milky Way using stellar streams and a wide range of photometric and kinematic observations. Through the use of mock data we demonstrate that a standard suite of Galactic observations leads to…
We present the first detailed study comparing the populations of stellar streams in cosmological simulations to observed Milky Way dwarf galaxy streams. In particular, we compare streams identified around Milky Way analogs in the FIRE-2…
Tidal streams of disrupting dwarf galaxies orbiting around their host galaxy offer a unique way to constrain the shape of galactic gravitational potentials. Such streams can be used as leaning tower gravitational experiments on galactic…
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…
Dynamically cold stellar streams from tidally dissolved globular clusters (GCs) serve as excellent tools to measure the Galactic mass distribution and show promise to probe the nature of dark matter. For successful application of these…
The dark matter halos that surround Milky Way-like galaxies in cosmological simulations are, to first order, triaxial. Nearly 30 years ago it was predicted that such triaxial dark matter halos should exhibit steady figure rotation or…