Related papers: Tidal Streams as Probes of the Galactic Potential
Tidal features from galaxy mergers, particularly stellar streams, offer valuable insights into galaxy assembly and dark matter halo properties. This paper aims to identify a large sample of nearby stellar streams suitable for detailed…
Nearly a hundred stellar streams have been found to date around the Milky Way and the number keeps growing at an ever faster pace. Here we present the galstreams library, a compendium of angular position, distance, proper motion and radial…
In this contribution we discuss the expected properties of our halo if our Galaxy had been built from mergers of smaller systems. Using both analytic arguments and high-resolution simulations, we find that the Galactic halo in the Solar…
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…
The Gaia mission has led to the discovery of over 100 stellar streams in the Milky Way, most of which likely originated from globular clusters (GCs). As the upcoming wide-field surveys can potentially continue to increase the number of…
Obtaining reliable distance estimates to gas clouds within the Milky Way is challenging in the absence of certain tracers. The kinematic distance approach has been used as an alternative, derived from the assumption of circular trajectories…
Dark matter sub-halos that pass near or through a thin tidal star stream locally increase its velocity dispersion. Subsequent orbital evolution further increases the velocity dispersion and stream width, lowering the surface density of a…
The Orphan Stream is one of the most prominent tidal streams in the Galactic halo. Using data on red giants, RR Lyrae, and horizontal branch stars from Gaia and other surveys, we determine the proper motion of the Orphan Stream over a path…
From the $\Lambda$ cold dark matter paradigm it is expected that galaxies merge and grow in their environments. These processes form various tidal features depending on the merger mass ratio, orbital parameters, and gas richness. We…
Stars and their kinematics provide one of the tools available for studies of the shapes of galaxies and their halos. In this review I focus on two specific applications: the shape of the Milky Way dark halo and the shape of the LMC disk.…
We have developed a method for estimating the properties of the progenitor dwarf galaxy from the tidal stream of stars that were ripped from it as it fell into the Milky Way. In particular, we show that the mass and radial profile of a…
Galactic halos are known to grow hierarchically, inside out. This implies a correlation between the infall lookback time of satellites and their binding energy. Cosmological simulations predict a linear relation between the infall lookback…
Stellar streams are sensitive probes of the Galactic potential. The likelihood of a stream model given stream data is often assessed using simulations. However, comparing to simulations is challenging when even the stream paths can be hard…
We use simulations of merging galaxies to explore the sensitivity of the morphology of tidal tails to variations of the halo mass distributions in the parent galaxies. Our goal is to constrain the mass of dark halos in well-known merging…
The circular speed curve of the Milky Way provides a key constraint on its mass distribution, reflecting the axisymmetric component of the gravitational potential. This is especially critical in the inner Galaxy ($R \lesssim 4$ kpc), where…
Deep observations of faint surface brightness stellar tidal streams in external galaxies with LSST are addressed in this White Paper contribution. We propose using the Wide--Fast--Deep survey that contains several nearby galaxies (at…
SHORTENED ABSTRACT: We present numerical investigations designed to critically test models of the origin of the Magellanic Stream. The most developed model is the tidal model which fails to reproduce several of its characteristic…
To place the highly substructured stellar halos of the Milky Way and M31 in a larger context of hierarchical galaxy formation, it is necessary to understand the prevalence and properties of tidal substructure around external galaxies. This…
Streams of stars from captured dwarf galaxies and dissolved globular clusters are identifiable through the similarity of their orbital parameters, a fact that remains true long after the streams have dispersed spatially. We calculate the…
Thin stellar streams, formed from the tidal disruption of globular clusters, are important gravitational tools, sensitive to both global and small-scale properties of dark matter. The Palomar 5 stellar stream (Pal 5) is an exemplar stream…