Related papers: Determining the galactic mass distribution using t…

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…

This paper presents an example where the morphology of a single stellar stream can be used to rule out a specific galactic potential form without the need for velocity information. We investigate the globular cluster Palomar5 (Pal 5), which…

We present the results of a detailed search for members of the Pal 5 tidal tail system in Gaia Data Release 2 (DR2). Tidal tails provide a sensitive method for measuring the current and past gravitational potential of their host galaxy as…

We develop a semi-analytic method for determining the phase-space population of tidal debris along the orbit of a disrupting satellite galaxy and illustrate its use with a number of applications. We use this method to analyze Zhao's…

Using photometry and proper motions from Gaia Data Release 2, we detect a 50 degree-long stream of about 70 stars extending westward from the halo globular cluster M5. Based on the similarities in distance, proper motions, inferred…

Recent analyses of the Pal 5 and GD-1 tidal streams suggest that the inner dark matter halo of the Milky Way is close to spherical, in tension with predictions from collisionless N-body simulations of cosmological structure formation. We…

Stellar streams form through the tidal disruption of satellite galaxies or globular clusters orbiting a host galaxy. Globular cluster streams are exciting since they are thin (dynamically cold) and, therefore sensitive to perturbations from…

Flat rotation curves v(r) are naturally explained by elongated (prolate) Dark Matter (DM) distributions, and we have provided competitive fits to the SPARC database. To further probe the geometry of the halo one needs out-of-plane…

We describe ongoing work on a new method that allows one to determine the mass and relative position (in galactocentric radius and azimuth) of galactic companions purely from analysis of observed disturbances in gas disks. Here, we…

I analyse the projected density distribution of member stars over a wide area surrounding 18 Galactic globular clusters using the photometric and astrometric information provided by the second data release of the Gaia mission. A 5D mixture…

We present the e-TidalGCs Project which aims at modeling and predicting the extra-tidal features surrounding all Galactic globular clusters for which 6D phase space information, masses and sizes are available (currently 159 globular…

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 a panoramic map of the stellar streams of the Milky Way based upon astrometric and photometric measurements from the Gaia DR2 catalogue. In this first contribution, we concentrate on the halo at heliocentric distances beyond 5…

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 report the discovery of two well-defined tidal tails emerging from the sparse remote globular cluster Palomar 5. These tails stretch out symmetrically to both sides of the cluster in the direction of constant Galactic latitude and…

One of the most promising tracers of the Galactic potential in the halo region are stellar streams. However, individual stream fits can be limited by systematic biases. To study these individual stream systematics, we fit streams in Milky…

We present a brief history of Galactic astrophysics, and explain the origin of halo substructure in the Galaxy. We motivate our study of tidal streams by highlighting the tight constraints that analysis of the trajectories of tidal streams…

Stellar dynamical model globular clusters are introduced into reconstituted versions of the dark matter halos of the Via-Lactea II (VL-2) simulation to follow the star cluster tidal mass loss and stellar stream formation. The clusters…

We examine the outer structure of 12 Galactic globular clusters using star-count analyses. Deep, two-color, photographic photometry is used to select and count stars with colors and magnitudes consistent with cluster-specific,…

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…