We find that a steady state bar induces transient features at low velocities in the solar neighborhood velocity distribution due to the initial response of the disc, following the formation of the bar. We associate these velocity streams with two quasi-periodic orbital families, librating around the stable x_1(1) and x_1(2) orbits near the bar's outer Lindblad resonance (OLR). In a reference frame moving with the bar, these otherwise stationary orbits precess on a timescale dependent on the strength of the bar, consistent with predictions from a simple Hamiltonian model for the resonance. This behavior allows the two orbital families to reach the solar neighborhood and manifest themselves as clumps in the u-v plane moving away from (x_1(2)), and toward (x_1(1)) the Galactic center. Depending on the bar parameters and time since its formation, this model is consistent with the Pleiades and Coma Berenices, or Pleiades and Sirius moving groups seen in the Hipparcos stellar velocity distribution, if the Milky Way bar angle is 30<phi_0<45 [deg] and its pattern speed is Omega_b/Omega_0=1.82\pm 0.07, where Omega_0 is the angular velocity of the local standard of rest (LSR). Since the process is recurrent, we can achieve a good match about every six LSR rotations. However, to be consistent with the fraction of stars in the Pleiades, we estimate that the Milky Way bar formed ~2 Gyr ago. This model argues against a common dynamical origin for the Hyades and Pleiades moving groups.
Based on the kernel estimator and wavelet technique, we have identified 22 moving group candidates in the solar neighborhood from a sample which includes around 14,000 dwarfs and 6000 giants. Six of them were previously known as the Hercules stream, the Sirus-UMa stream, the Hyades stream, the Caster group, the Pleiades stream, and the IC 2391; five of them have also been reported by other authors. 11 moving group candidates, not previously reported in the literature, showprominent structures in dwarf or giant samples.Acatalog of moving group candidates in the solar neighborhood is presented i…
We have cross-matched the LAMOST DR3 with the Gaia DR1 TGAS catalogs and obtained a sample of 166,827 stars with reliable kinematics. A technique based on the wavelet transform was applied to detect significant overdensities in velocity space among five subsamples divided by spatial position. In total, 16 significant overdensities of stars with very similar kinematics were identified. Among these, four are new stream candidates and the rest are previously known groups. Both the U-V velocity and metallicity distributions of the local sample show a clear gap between the Hercules structure and th…
We report the discovery of a large, dynamically cold, coeval stellar stream that is currently traversing the immediate solar neighborhood at a distance of only 100 pc. The structure was identified in a wavelet decomposition of the 3D velocity space of all stars within 300 pc to the Sun. Its members form a highly elongated structure with a length of at least 400 pc, while its vertical extent measures only about 50 pc. Stars in the stream are not isotropically distributed but instead form two parallel lanes with individual local overdensities, that may correspond to a remnant core of a tidally d…
Nearby stellar streams carry unique information on the dynamical evolution and disruption of stellar systems in the Galaxy, the mass distribution in the disk, and provide unique targets for planet formation and evolution studies. We revisit the stream discovered in Meingast et al (2019) to search for new members, using Gaia DR2 data and a machine learning approach. We use a bagging classifier of one-class Support Vector Machines to perform a search in positions and proper motions for new stream members. We use the variable prediction frequency resulting from the multitude of classifiers to est…
Based on a new version of the Hipparcos catalogue and an updated Geneva-Copenhagen survey of F and G dwarfs, we analyze the space velocity field of about 17000 single stars in the solar neighborhood. The main known clumps, streams, and branches (Pleiades, Hyades, Sirius, Coma Berenices, Hercules, Wolf 630-alpha Ceti, and Arcturus) have been identified using various approaches. The evolution of the space velocity field for F and G dwarfs has been traced as a function of the stellar age. We have managed to confirm the existence of the recently discovered KFR08 stream. We have found 19 Hipparcos …
About 20% of stars in the solar vicinity are in the Hercules stream, a bundle of stars that move together with a velocity distinct from the Sun. Its origin is still uncertain. Here, we explore the possibility that Hercules is made of trojans, stars captured at L4, one the Lagrangian points of the stellar bar. Using GALAKOS--a high-resolution N-body simulation of the Galactic disk--we follow the motions of stars in the co-rotating frame of the bar and confirm previous studies on Hercules being formed by stars in co-rotation resonance with the bar. Unlike previous work, we demonstrate that the r…
It has been proposed that the Hercules stream, a group of co-moving stars in the Solar neighborhood offset from the bulk of the velocity distribution, is the result of resonant interactions between stars in the outer disk and the Galactic bar. So far it has only been seen in the immediate Solar neighborhood, but the resonance model makes a prediction over a large fraction of the Galactic disk. I predict the distribution of stellar velocities and the changing Hercules feature in this distribution as a function of location in the Galactic disk in a simple model for the Galaxy and the bar that pr…
We have identified the four most significant features in the UV velocity distribution of solar neighborhood stars: H1, H2 in the Hercules stream and W1, W2 in the Wolf 630 stream. We have formulated the problem of determining several characteristics of the central Galactic bar independently from each of the identified features by assuming that the Hercules and Wolf 630 streams are of a bar-induced dynamical nature. The problem has been solved by constructing 2:1 resonant orbits in the rotating bar frame for each star in these streams. Analysis of the resonant orbits found has shown that the ba…
A 22 GHz water maser survey was conducted towards 178 O-rich AGB stars with the aim of identifying maser emission associated with the Sagittarius stellar stream. In this survey, maser emissions were detected in 21 targets, of which 20 were new detections. We studied the Galactic distributions of H2O and SiO maser-traced AGBs towards the Sgr orbital plane, and found an elongated structure towards the (l, b)~(340, 40) direction. In order to verify its association with the Sagittarius tidal stream, we further studied the 3D motions of these sources, but found, kinematically, these maser-traced AG…
We perform numerical simulations of a stellar galactic disk with initial conditions chosen to represent an unrelaxed population which might have been left following a merger. Stars are unevenly distributed in radial action angle, though the disk is axisymmetric. The velocity distribution in the simulated Solar neighborhood exhibits waves traveling in the direction of positive v, where u,v are the radial and tangential velocity components. As the system relaxes and structure wraps in phase space, the features seen in the uv-plane move closer together. We show that these results can be obtained …
The Hercules stream is a group of co-moving stars in the Solar neighbourhood, which can potentially be explained as a signature of either the outer Lindblad resonance (OLR) of a fast Galactic bar or the corotation resonance of a slower bar. In either case, the feature should be present over a large area of the disc. With the recent commissioning of the APOGEE-2 Southern spectrograph we can search for the Hercules stream at $(l,b)=(270^\circ,0)$, a direction in which the Hercules stream, if caused by the bar's OLR, would be strong enough to be detected using only the line-of-sight velocities. W…
The shape of the Galactic dark halo can, in principle, be inferred through modelling of stellar tidal streams in the Milky Way halo. The brightest and the longest of these, the Sagittarius stream, reaches out to large Galactocentric distances and hence can deliver the tightest constraints on the Galaxy's potential. In this contribution, we revisit the idea that the Sagittarius Stream was formed from a rotating progenitor. We demonstrate that the angle between the disk's angular momentum and the progenitor's orbital angular momentum does not remain constant throughout the disruption. Instead, i…
Photoheating associated with reionization suppressed star formation in low-mass galaxies. Reionization was inhomogeneous, however, affecting different regions at different times. To establish the causal connection between reionization and suppression, we must take this local variation into account. We analyze the results of CoDa (`Cosmic Dawn') I, the first fully-coupled radiation-hydrodynamical simulation of reionization and galaxy formation in the Local Universe, in a volume large enough to model reionization globally but with enough resolving power to follow all atomic-cooling galactic halo…
We have identified the four most significant features in the UV velocity distribution of solar neighborhood stars: H1,H2 and W1,W2 in the Hercules and Wolf 630 streams respectively. We have put the task of determining number of characteristics of the central Galactic bar independently from each of the identified features by assuming that the Hercules and Wolf 630 streams have a bar-induced dynamical nature. The problem has been solved by constructing 2:1 resonant orbits in the rotating bar frame for each star in these streams. Analysis of the resonant orbits found has shown that the bar patter…
In order to study the streaming motions of miras in the Solar neighborhood, we newly surveyed 379 red variables in the SiO maser lines at 42.821 and 43.122 GHz with the Nobeyama 45m radio telescope. Accurate radial velocities were obtained for 229 (220 new) detected stars. The sample is selected from optical variables found by new automated surveys: the Northern Sky Variability Survey and the All Sky Automated Survey. The new sample consists of the "bluer" objects compared with those observed in the previous SiO surveys. The distances to the objects are estimated using the period-luminosity re…
The phase-space structure of our Galaxy holds the key to understand and reconstruct its formation. The Lambda-CDM model predicts a richly structured phase-space distribution of dark matter and (halo) stars, consisting of streams of particles torn from their progenitors during the process of hierarchical merging. While such streams quickly loose their spatial coherence in the process of phase mixing, the individual stars keep their common origin imprinted into their kinematic and chemical properties, allowing the recovery of the Galaxy's individual "building blocks". The field of Galactic Arche…
In this paper, we present a holistic view of the detection, characterization, and origin of stellar streams in the disk of a simulated Milky Way-like galaxy. The star-by-star simulation of the Galaxy evolves stars born in clusters in a realistic galactic potential that includes spiral arms, a bar, and giant molecular clouds over $5$ Gyr. We first devise a new hybrid method to detect stellar streams that combines phase space density information along with the action-angle space spanned by stars in our simulation. We find that streams' progenitor star clusters and associations are all preferenti…
The aim of this work is to contribute to the understanding of the stellar velocity distribution in the solar neighborhood (SN). We propose that the structures on the $U-V$ planes, known as the moving groups, can be mainly explained by the spiral arms perturbations. The applied model of the Galactic disk and spiral arms, with the parameters defined by observational data and with pattern speed $Ω_p=$28.0 km s$^{-1}$ kpc$^{-1}$, is the same that allowed us to explain the origin of the Local Arm and the Sun's orbit trapped inside the corotation resonance (CR). We show that the $U-V$ picture of the…
We combine photometric metallicities with astrometry from Gaia DR3 to examine the chemodynamic structure of ~250,000 K dwarfs in the Solar Neighborhood (SN). In kinematics, we observe ridges/clumps of "kinematic groups", like studies of more massive main-sequence stars. Here we note clear differences in both metallicity and vertical velocity as compared to the surrounding regions in velocity space and hypothesize this is due to differences in mean age. To test this, we develop a method to estimate the age distribution of sub-populations of stars. In this method, we use GALAH data to define pro…
Flattened axisymmetric galactic potentials are known to host minor orbit families surrounding orbits with commensurable frequencies. The behavior of orbits that belong to these orbit families is fundamentally different than that of typical orbits with non-commensurable frequencies. We investigate the evolution of stellar streams on orbits near the boundaries between orbit families (separatrices) in a flattened axisymmetric potential. We demonstrate that the separatrix divides these streams into two groups of stars that belong to two different orbit families, and that as a result, these streams…
Gaia Data Release 2 revealed detailed structures of nearby stars in phase space. These include the Hercules stream, whose origin is still debated. Most of the previous numerical studies conjectured that the observed structures originate from orbits in resonance with the bar, based on static potential models for the Milky Way. We, in contrast, approach the problem via a self-consistent, dynamic, and morphologically well-resolved model, namely a full $N$-body simulation of the Milky Way. Our simulation comprises about 5.1 billion particles in the galactic stellar bulge, bar, disk, and dark-matte…
We consider stars with radial velocities, proper motions, and distance estimates from the RAVE4 catalogue. Based on a sample of more than 145000 stars at distances $r<0.5$~kpc, we have found the following kinematic parameters: (U,V,W)_\odot=(9.12, 20.80, 7.66)\pm(0.10, 0.10, 0.08) km s^{-1}, Ω_0=28.71\pm0.63 km s^{-1} kpc^{-1}, and Ω'_0=-4.28\pm0.11 km s^{-1} kpc^{-2}. This gives the linear rotation velocity V_0=230\pm12 km s^{-1} (for the adopted R_0= 8.0\pm0.4 kpc) and the Oort constants A=17.12\pm0.45 km s^{-1} kpc^{-1} and B=-11.60\pm0.77 km s^{-1} kpc^{-1}. The 2D velocity distributions i…
It has been suggested that a resonance between a rotating bar and stars in the solar neighbourhood can produce the so called 'Hercules stream'. Recently, a second bar may have been identified in the Galactic centre, the so called 'long bar', which is longer and much flatter than the traditional Galactic bar, and has a similar mass. We looked at the dynamical effects of both bars, separately and together, on orbits of stars integrated backwards from local position and velocities, and a model of the Galactic potential which includes the bars directly. Both bars can produce Hercules like features…
An N-body hybrid simulation, integrating both massive and tracer particles, of a Galactic disk is used to study the stellar phase space distribution or velocity distributions in different local neighborhoods. Pattern speeds identified in Fourier spectrograms suggest that two-armed and three-armed spiral density waves, a bar and a lopsided motion are coupled in this simulation, with resonances of one pattern lying near resonances of other patterns. We construct radial and tangential (uv) velocity distributions from particles in different local neighborhoods. More than one clump is common in the…
The radio source J1819+3845 underwent a period of extreme interstellar scintillation between circa 1999 and 2007. The plasma structure responsible for this scintillation was determined to be just $1$-$3\,$pc from the solar system and to posses a density of $n_e\sim 10^2\,$cm$^{-3}$ that is three orders of magnitude higher than the ambient interstellar density (de Bruyn & Macquart 2015). Here we present radio-polarimetric images of the field towards J1819+3845 at wavelengths of 0.2, 0.92 and 2$\,$m. We detect an elliptical plasma globule of approximate size $1^\circ \times \gtrsim 2^\circ$ (maj…
Both the gas flaring and the dip in the rotation curve, which was recently reconfirmed with precise measurements using the VERA VLBI array in Japan, suggest doughnut-like substructure in the dark matter (DM) halo. A global fit to all available data shows that the data are indeed best described by an NFW DM profile complemented by two doughnut-like DM substructures with radii of 4.2 and 12.4 kpc, which coincide with the local dust ring and the Monocerus ring of stars, respectively. Both regions have been suggested as regions with tidal streams from "shredded" satellites. If real, the radial ext…
As a result of their internal dynamical coherence, thin stellar streams formed by disrupting globular clusters (GCs) can act as detectors of dark matter (DM) substructure in the Galactic halo. Perturbations induced by close flybys amplify into detectable density gaps, providing a probe both of the abundance and of the masses of DM subhaloes. Here, we use N-body simulations to show that the Galactic population of giant molecular clouds (GMCs) can also produce gaps (and clumps) in GC streams, and so may confuse the detection of DM subhaloes. We explore the cases of streams analogous to the obser…
Approximately once every $10^4$ years, a star passes close enough to the supermassive black hole Sgr A* at the center of the Milky Way to be pulled apart by the black hole's tidal forces. The star is then "spaghettified" into a long stream of matter, with approximately one half being bound to Sgr A* and the other half unbound. Within this stream, the local self-gravity dominates the tidal field of Sgr A*, which at minimum restricts the stream to a small finite width. As the stream cools from adiabatic expansion and begins to recombine, the residual self-gravity allows for planetary-mass fragme…
The variations of kinematic parameters with age are considered for a sample of 15 402 thin-disk O--F stars with accurate $α$, $δ$, $μ$, and $π>3$ mas from the Hipparcos catalogue and radial velocities from the PCRV catalogue. The ages have been calculated from the positions of the stars on the Hertzsprung--Russell diagram relative to the isochrones from the Padova database by taking into account the extinction from the previously constructed 3D analytical model and extinction coefficient $R_V$ from the 3D map of its variations. Smooth, mutually reconciled variations of the velocity dispersions…
Using test particle simulations we examine the structure of the outer Galactic disk as it is perturbed by a satellite in a tight eccentric orbit about the Galaxy. A satellite of mass a few times 10^9 Msol can heat the outer Galactic disk, excite spiral structure and a warp and induce streams in the velocity distribution. We examine particle eccentricity versus the change in mean radius between initial and current orbits. Correlations between these quantities are reduced after a few satellite pericenter passages. Stars born in the outer galaxy can be moved in radius from their birth positions a…
We present the results of a density-based clustering analysis of the 6-dimensional XYZ Galactic positions and UVW space velocities of nearby ($\leq$ 200 pc) Gaia EDR3 stars with radial velocities using HDBSCAN, in opposition to previous studies that only included positions and tangential velocities. Among the 241 recovered clusters, we identify more than 50 known associations, 32 new candidate stellar streams aged 100 Myr-3 Gyr, 9 extensions of known Theia groups uncovered by Kounkel & Covey (2019), and 8 newly recognized coronae around nearby open clusters. Three confirmed exoplanet-hosting s…
