The spatial distribution of Milky Way (MW) subhaloes provides an important set of observables for testing cosmological models. These include the radial distribution of luminous satellites, planar configurations, and the abundance of dark subhaloes whose existence or absence is key to distinguishing amongst dark matter models. We use the COCO $N$-body simulations of cold dark matter (CDM) and 3.3keV thermal relic warm dark matter (WDM) to predict the satellite spatial distribution in the limit that the impact of baryonic physics is minimal. We demonstrate that the radial distributions of CDM and 3.3keV-WDM luminous satellites are identical if the minimum pre-infall halo mass to form a galaxy is $>10^{8.5}\mathrm{M}_{\odot}$. The distribution of dark subhaloes is significantly more concentrated in WDM due to the absence of low mass, recently accreted substructures that typically inhabit the outer parts of a MW halo in CDM. We show that subhaloes of mass $[10^{7},10^{8}]\mathrm{M}_{\odot}$ and within 30kpc of the centre are the stripped remnants of larger haloes in both models. Therefore their abundance in WDM is $3\times$ higher than one would anticipate from the overall WDM subhalo population. We estimate that differences between CDM and WDM concentration-mass relations can be probed for subhalo-stream impact parameters $<2$kpc. Finally, we find that the impact of WDM on planes of satellites is likely negligible. Comprehensive comparisons with observations will require further work with high resolution, self-consistent hydrodynamical simulations.
Detectability of dark matter subhalo impacts in Milky Way stellar streams
University of California, San Diego（加利福尼亚大学圣地亚哥分校）；Institute of High Energy Physics, Austrian Academy of Sciences（奥地利科学院高能物理研究所）；The Observatories of the Carnegie Institution for Science（卡内基科学机构天文台）
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 use the Eris simulation to test whether the combination of dissipative physics and hierarchical structure formation can produce Milky Way-like galaxies whose dark matter halos match the tidal stream constraints from the GD-1 and Pal 5 clusters. We use a dynamical model of the simulated Eris galaxy to generate many realizations of the GD-1 and Pal 5 tidal strea…
Collisionless dark matter galactic halos are expected to exhibit damped oscillations as a result of ongoing late time accretion. An n-body model of the cosmological assembly of a Milky Way-like halo is used to quantify the time dependence of its gravitational field. The simulation contains stellar streams whose incommensurate perpendicular velocities are found to have an approximately exponential distribution with a scale of 10-20\kms, depending on how the stars are selected, comparable to those reported for the Orphan stream. The fluctuations in the quadrupole moment of the dark matter halo a…
We present a novel method to constrain the mass of ultra-light bosons as the dark matter using stellar streams formed by disrupting Globular Clusters in the Milky Way. The turbulent density field of Fuzzy Dark Matter (FDM) haloes results in perturbations and dynamical heating of thin streams. Using numerical simulations based on an effective model, we explore the magnitude of this phenomenon and show that this is observable for the range of axion masses $m_a$ that is interesting for alleviating the `small-scale problems' of $Λ$CDM. We derive an analytical model for the thickening of thin stell…
We present a model for the interaction of the GD-1 stellar stream with a massive perturber that naturally explains many of the observed stream features, including a gap and an off-stream spur of stars. The model involves an impulse by a fast encounter, after which the stream grows a loop of stars at different orbital energies. At specific viewing angles, this loop appears offset from the stream track. A quantitative comparison of the spur and gap features prefers models where the perturber is in the mass range of $10^6\,\rm M_\odot$ to $10^8\,\rm M_\odot$. Orbit integrations back in time show …
The Cold Dark Matter paradigm predicts vast numbers of dark matter sub-halos to be orbiting in galactic halos. The sub-halos are detectable through the gaps they create gaps in stellar streams. The gap-rate is an integral over the density of sub-halos, their mass function, velocity distribution and the dynamical age of the stream. The rate of visible gap creation is a function of the width of the stream. The available data for four streams: the NW stream of M31, the Pal~5 stream, the Orphan Stream and the Eastern Banded Structure, are compared to the LCDM predicted relation. We find a remarkab…
Recent analyses of the stellar stream of the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy have claimed that the kinematics and three-dimensional location of the M-giant stars in this structure constrain the dark matter halo of our Galaxy to possess a triaxial shape that is extremely flattened, being essentially an oblate ellipsoid oriented perpendicular to the Galactic disk. Using a new stream-fitting algorithm, based on a Markov Chain Monte Carlo procedure, we investigate whether this claim remains valid if we allow the density profile of the Milky Way halo greater freedom. We find stream solutions that fit the …
There is increasing evidence that a substantial fraction of Milky Way satellite galaxies align in a rotationally-supported plane of satellites, a rare configuration in cosmological simulations of galaxy formation. It has been suggested that other Milky Way substructures (namely young halo globular clusters and stellar/gaseous streams) similarly tend to align with this plane, accordingly dubbed the Vast Polar Structure (VPOS). Using systemic proper motions inferred from Gaia data, we find that globular cluster orbital poles are not clustered in the VPOS direction, though the population with the…
Pal 5 is a low mass, low velocity dispersion, globular cluster with spectacular tidal tails. We use the SDSS DR8 data to extend the density measurements of the trailing star stream to 23 degrees distance from the cluster, at which point the stream runs off the edge of the available sky coverage. The size and the number of gaps in the stream are measured using a filter which approximates the structure of the gaps found in stream simulations. We find 5 gaps that are at least 99% confidence detections with about a dozen gaps at 90% confidence. The statistical significance of a gap is estimated us…
Stellar streams are key players in many aspects of Milky Way studies and, in particular, studying their orbital dynamics is crucial for furthering our understanding of the Milky Way's gravitational potential. Although this is not a trivial task when faced with incomplete dynamical phase-space information, transverse motions of streams can nevertheless be comprehended by harnessing the information contained within their radial velocity gradients. Such methods are not only applicable to stellar streams, but also to HI streams residing in the Milky Way halo. Here, I present the results of two stu…
The GD-1 star stream is currently the best available for identifying density fluctuations, "gaps", along its length as a test of the LCDM prediction of large numbers of dark matter sub-halos orbiting in the halo. Density variations of some form are present, since the variance of the density along the stream is three times that expected from the empirically estimated variation in the filtered mean star counts. The density variations are characterized with filters that approximate the shape of sub-halo gravitationally induced stream gaps. The filters locate gaps and measures their amplitude, lea…
We report the discovery of a 70-degree long stellar stream in the Milky Way halo, which criss-crosses the well known "GD-1" stream. We show that this new stellar structure ("Kshir") and GD-1 lie at similar distance, and are remarkably correlated in kinematics. We propose several explanations for the nature of this new structure and its possible association with GD-1. However, a scenario in which these two streams were accreted onto the Milky Way within the same dark matter sub-halo seems to provide a natural explanation for their phase-space entanglement, and other complexities of this coupled…
It has recently been shown that the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) has a substantial effect on the Milky Way's stellar halo and stellar streams. Here, we explore how deformations of the Milky Way and LMC's dark matter haloes affect stellar streams, and whether these effects are observable. In particular, we focus on the Orphan-Chenab (OC) stream which passes particularly close to the LMC, and spans a large portion of the Milky Way's halo. We represent the Milky Way--LMC system using basis function expansions that capture their evolution in an $N$-body simulation. We present the properties of thi…
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 degeneracies in the inferred halo parameters. We then incorporate a GD-1-like stream into this suite using the orbit-fitting technique and show that the streams reduces the uncertainties in these parameters provided all observations are fit simultaneously. We also explore how the assumption of a disk-halo alignment can lead unphysical models. Our results may explai…
Probing Atomic Dark Matter with Stellar Streams in Milky Way-Mass Galaxies
Princeton University（普林斯顿大学）；University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）；Flatiron Institute（平顿研究所）；University of California, San Diego（加州大学圣地亚哥分校）；University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）
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…
Stellar streams originating in disrupted dwarf galaxies and star clusters are observed around the Milky Way and nearby galaxies. Such substructures are the important tracers that record how the host haloes have accreted progenitor galaxies. Based on the cosmological context, we investigate the relationship between structural properties of substructures such as length and thinness at $z=0$, and orbits of their progenitors. We model stellar components of a large sample of substructures around Milky Way-sized haloes by combining semi-analytic models with a high-resolution cosmological $N$-body si…
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 random provide a measure of the likelihood of a potential star stream. Comparisons between the radial velocity distribution within a great circle and the radial velocity distribution of the entire sample also measure the statistical significance of potential streams. The radial velocities enable construction of a more powerful joint statistical test for identif…
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 kpc, and at Galactic latitudes $|b|>30°$, using the STREAMFINDER algorithm to detect structures along plausible orbits that are consistent with the Gaia proper motion measurements. We find a rich network of criss-crossing streams in the halo. Some of these structures were previously-known, several are new discoveries, but others are potentially artefacts of th…
We present evidence for a new Milky Way stellar tidal stream in the direction of the Andromeda and Triangulum (M31 and M33) galaxies. Using a matched-filter technique, we search the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 8 by creating stellar density maps which probe the Milky Way halo at distances between 8 and 40 kpc. A visual search of these maps recovers all of the major known stellar streams, as well as a new stream in the direction of M31/M33 which we name the Triangulum stream. The stream spans 0.2 deg by 12 deg on the sky, or 75 pc by 5.5 kpc in physical units with a best fitting distan…
University of California, San Diego（加州大学圣地亚哥分校）；University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；The Observatories of the Carnegie Institution for Science（卡内基科学研究所天文台）
One of the most intriguing properties of the GD-1 stellar stream is the existence of three gaps. If these gaps were formed by close encounters with dark matter subhalos, the GD-1 stream opens an exciting window through which we can see the size, mass, and velocity distributions of the dark matter subhalos in the Milky Way. However, in order to use the GD-1 stream as a probe of the dark matter substructure, we need to disprove that these gaps are not due to the perturbations from baryonic components of the Milky Way. Here we ran a large number of test particle simulations to investigate the pro…
Stellar streams produced from dwarf galaxies provide direct evidence of the hierarchical formation of the Milky Way. Here, we present the first comprehensive study of the "LMS-1" stellar stream, that we detect by searching for wide streams in the Gaia EDR3 dataset using the STREAMFINDER algorithm. This stream was recently discovered by Yuan et al. (2020). We detect LMS-1 as a $60°$ long stream to the north of the Galactic bulge, at a distance of $\sim 20$ kpc from the Sun, together with additional components that suggest that the overall stream is completely wrapped around the inner Galaxy. Us…
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, based on modeling different stream properties in axisymmetric Galactic models has yielded conflicting results: while the angular precession of the Sgr leading arm is most consistent with a spherical or slightly oblate halo, the radial velocities of stars in this arm are only reproduced by prolate halo models. We demonstrate that this apparent paradox can be r…
Tidal streams are a powerful probe of the Milky Way (MW) potential shape. In this paper, we introduce a simple test particle method to fit stream data, using a Markov Chain Monte Carlo technique to marginalise over uncertainties in the progenitor's orbit and the Milky Way halo shape parameters. Applying it to mock data of thin streams in the MW halo, we show that, even for very cold streams, stream-orbit offsets - not modelled in our simple method - introduce systematic biases in the recovered shape parameters. For the streams that we consider, and our particular choice of potential parameteri…
MilkyWay@home is a volunteer computing project that allows people from every country in the world to volunteer their otherwise idle processors to Milky Way research. Currently, more than 25,000 people (150,000 since November 9, 2007) contribute about half a PetaFLOPS of computing power to our project. We currently run two types of applications: one application fits the spatial density profile of tidal streams using statistical photometric parallax, and the other application finds the N-body simulation parameters that produce tidal streams that best match the measured density profile of known t…
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 …
We report the discovery of a young (${\rm age} \sim 130~{\rm Myr}$), low-mass ($M \sim 1200~{\rm M}_\odot$), metal-poor ($[{\rm Fe}/{\rm H}] \sim -1.1$) stellar association at a heliocentric distance $D \approx 29~{\rm kpc}$, placing it far into the Milky Way halo. At its present Galactocentric position $(R, z) \sim (23, 15)~{\rm kpc}$, the association is (on the sky) near the leading arm of the gas stream emanating from the Magellanic cloud system, but is located $\approx 60^\circ$ from the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) center on the other side of the Milky Way disk. If we assume that the clus…
We investigate the possibility that the recently discovered Hercules Milky Way satellite is in fact a stellar stream in formation, thereby explaining its very elongated shape with an axis ratio of 3 to 1. Under the assumption that Hercules is a stellar stream and that its stars are flowing along the orbit of its progenitor, we find an orbit that would have recently brought the system close enough to the Milky Way to induce its disruption and transformation from a bound dwarf galaxy into a stellar stream. The application of simple analytical techniques to the tentative radial velocity gradient …
We study the globular clusters (GCs) in the spiral galaxy NGC~5907 well-known for its spectacular stellar stream -- to better understand its origin. Using wide-field Subaru/Suprime-Cam $gri$ images and deep Keck/DEIMOS multi-object spectroscopy, we identify and obtain the kinematics of several GCs superimposed on the stellar stream and the galaxy disk. We estimate the total number of globular clusters in NGC 5907 to be $154\pm44$, with a specific frequency of $0.73\pm0.21$. Our analysis also reveals a significant, new population of young star cluster candidates found mostly along the outskirts…
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 Matter galaxy formation paradigm. Accurate models of the disruption dynamics of the Sgr progenitor are necessary to employ this tool. Using a combination of analytic modeling and N-body simulations, we build a new model of the Sgr orbit and resulting stellar stream. In contrast to previous models, we simulate the full infall trajectory of the Sgr progenitor f…
We propose a new model for the dark matter halo of the Milky Way that fits the properties of the stellar stream associated with the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy. Our dark halo is oblate with q_z = 0.9 for r < 10 kpc, and can be made to follow the Law & Majewski model at larger radii. However, we find that the dynamical perturbations induced by the Large Magellanic Cloud on the orbit of Sgr cannot be neglected when modeling its streams. When taken into account, this leads us to constrain the Galaxy's outer halo shape to have minor-to-major axis ratio (c/a)_Φ= 0.8 and intermediate-to-major axis rati…
Context. Stellar tidal streams are the result of tidal interactions between a central galaxy and lower mass systems like satellite galaxies or globular clusters. For the Local Group, many diffuse substructures have been identified and their link to the galaxy evolution has been traced. However it cannot be assumed that the Milky Way or M31 are representative of their galaxy class, and a larger sample of analogue galaxies beyond the Local Group is required to be able to generalise the underlying theory. Aims. We want to characterise photometrically the stellar streams around Milky Way analogues…
Many of the Milky Way's globular clusters are likely accreted from satellite galaxies that have long since merged with the Milky Way. When these globular clusters are susceptible to tidal disruption, this process likely starts already inside the parent satellite leading to an early stellar stream within the satellite. When the parent satellite merges with the Milky Way, the globular cluster and its pre-merger stellar stream are accreted in a somewhat chaotic process. Here, we investigate the properties of the accreted stream after the merger as we would see it today using a suite of simulation…
We constrain the shape of the Milky Way's halo by dynamical modeling of the observed phase-space tracks of the Pal 5 and GD-1 tidal streams. We find that the only information about the potential gleaned from the tracks of these streams are precise measurements of the shape of the gravitational potential---the ratio of vertical to radial acceleration---at the location of the streams, with weaker constraints on the radial and vertical accelerations separately. The latter will improve significantly with precise proper-motion measurements from Gaia. We measure that the overall potential flattening…
When a massive object crosses a star stream velocity changes are induced both along and transverse to the stream which can lead to the development of a visible gap. For a stream narrow relative to its orbital radius the time of stream crossing is sufficiently short that the impact approximation can be used to derive the changes in angular momenta and radial actions along the star stream. The epicyclic approximation is used to calculate the evolution of the density of the stream as it orbits around in a galactic potential. Analytic expressions are available for a point mass, however, the genera…
Evidence for the First Globular Cluster Stellar Stream beyond the Milky Way
University of Copenhagen（哥本哈根大学）；DTU Space, Technical University of Denmark（丹麦技术大学空间中心）；Princeton University（普林斯顿大学）；University of Arizona（亚利桑那大学）；Flatiron Institute（平顿研究所）；Northwestern University（西北大学）
We study how the indirect observation of dark matter substructures in the Milky Way, using recent stellar stream studies, translates into constraints for different dark matter models. Particularly, we use the measured number of dark subhalos in the mass range $10^7-10^9\,{\rm M_{\odot}}$ to constrain modifications of the subhalo mass function compared to the cold dark matter scenario. We obtain the lower bounds $m_{\rm WDM} > 3.2\,{\rm keV}$ and $m_{\rm FDM} > 5.2\times 10^{-21}\,{\rm eV}$ on the warm dark matter and fuzzy dark matter particle mass, respectively. When dark matter is coupled to…
We investigate the possibility that Hercules, a recently discovered Milky Way (MW) satellite, is a stellar stream in the process of formation. This hypothesis is motivated by Hercules' highly elongated shape as well as the measurement of a tentative radial velocity gradient along its body. The application of simple analytical techniques on radial velocity data of its member stars provides tight constraints on the tangential velocity of the system (v_t = -16^{+6}_{-22} km/s, relative to the Galactic Standard of Rest). Combining this with its large receding velocity (145 km/s) and distance (138 …
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 velocity track data for nearly a hundred (95) Galactic stellar streams. The information published in the literature has been collated and homogenised in a consistent format and used to provide a set of features uniformly computed throughout the library: e.g. stream length, end points, mean pole, stream's coordinate frame, polygon footprint, and pole and angu…
The flow of dark matter into the Milky Way and Large Magellanic Cloud in a model for the gravitational field of the neighboring galaxies yields a growth history for the dark matter halo of the Milky Way that ends up with angular momentum roughly in the observed direction, and it produces a dark matter stream around the Large Magellanic Cloud that resembles the Magellanic Stream.
Stellar streams record the accretion history of their host galaxy. We present a set of simulated streams from disrupted dwarf galaxies in 13 cosmological simulations of Milky Way (MW)-mass galaxies from the FIRE-2 suite at $z=0$, including 7 isolated Milky Way-mass systems and 6 hosts resembling the MW-M31 pair (full dataset at: https://flathub.flatironinstitute.org/sapfire). In total, we identify 106 simulated stellar streams, with no significant differences in the number of streams and masses of their progenitors between the isolated and paired environments. We resolve simulated streams with…
The satellite galaxies of the Milky Way (MW) align with and preferentially orbit in a vast polar structure (VPOS), which also contains globular clusters, stellar and gaseous streams. Similar alignments have been discovered around several other host galaxies. We test whether recently discovered objects in the MW halo, the satellite galaxy/globular cluster transition object named PSO J174.0675-10.8774 or Crater and three stellar streams, are part of the VPOS. Crater is situated close to the VPOS. Incorporating the new object in the VPOS-plane fit slightly improves the alignment of the plane with…
In a companion paper by Koposov et al., RR Lyrae from \textit{Gaia} Data Release 2 are used to demonstrate that stars in the Orphan stream have velocity vectors significantly misaligned with the stream track, suggesting that it has received a large gravitational perturbation from a satellite of the Milky Way. We argue that such a mismatch cannot arise due to any realistic static Milky Way potential and then explore the perturbative effects of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). We find that the LMC can produce precisely the observed motion-track mismatch and we therefore use the Orphan stream to…
Simulations of tidal streams show that close encounters with dark matter subhalos induce density gaps and distortions in on-sky path along the streams. Accordingly, observing disrupted streams in the Galactic halo would substantiate the hypothesis that dark matter substructure exists there, while in contrast, observing collimated streams with smoothly varying density profiles would place strong upper limits on the number density and mass spectrum of subhalos. Here, we examine several measures of stream "disruption" and their power to distinguish between halo potentials with and without substru…
We present the results of a detailed abundance analysis of one of the confirmed building blocks of the Milky Way stellar halo, a kinematically-coherent metal-poor stellar stream. We have obtained high resolution and high S/N spectra of 12 probable stream members using the MIKE spectrograph on the Magellan-Clay Telescope at Las Campanas Observatory and the 2dCoude spectrograph on the Smith Telescope at McDonald Observatory. We have derived abundances or upper limits for 51 species of 46 elements in each of these stars. The stream members show a range of metallicity (-3.4 < [Fe/H] < -1.5) but ar…
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 progenitor dwarf galaxy evolved along the orbit of the Orphan Stream, including the stellar and dark matter components, can be reconstructed from the distribution of stars in the tidal stream it produced. We use MilkyWay@home, a PetaFLOPS-scale distributed supercomputer, to optimize our dwarf galaxy parameters until we arrive at best-fit parameters. The algorith…
During the past 20 years, numerous stellar streams have been discovered in both the Milky Way and the Local Group. These streams have been tidally torn from orbiting systems, which suggests that most of them should roughly trace the orbit of their progenitors around the Galaxy. As a consequence, they play a fundamental role in understanding the formation and evolution of our Galaxy. This project is based on the possibility of applying a technique developed by Binney in 2008 to various tidal streams and overdensities in the Galaxy. The aim is to develop an efficient method to constrain the Gala…
We show that there is a low metallicity tidal stream that runs along l=143 deg. in the South Galactic Cap, about 34 kpc from the Sun, discovered from SEGUE stellar velocities. Since the most concentrated detections are in the Cetus constellation, and the orbital path is nearly polar, we name it the Cetus Polar Stream (CPS). Although it is spatially coincident with the Sgr dwarf trailing tidal tail at b=-70 deg., the metallicities ([Fe/H] = -2.1), ratio of blue straggler to blue horizontal branch stars, and velocities of the CPS stars differ from Sgr. Some CPS stars may contaminate previous sam…
We assemble a catalogue of candidate Sagittarius stream members with 5d and 6d phase-space information, using astrometric data from Gaia DR2, distances estimated from RR Lyrae stars, and line-of-sight velocities from various spectroscopic surveys. We find a clear misalignment between the stream track and the direction of the reflex-corrected proper motions in the leading arm of the stream, which we interpret as a signature of a time-dependent perturbation of the gravitational potential. A likely cause of this perturbation is the recent passage of the most massive Milky Way satellite - the Larg…
The length and pattern speed of the Milky Way bar are still controversial. Photometric and spectroscopic surveys of the inner Galaxy, as well as gas kinematics, favour a long and slowly rotating bar, with corotation around a Galactocentric radius of 6 kpc. On the other hand, the existence of the Hercules stream in local velocity space favours a short and fast bar with corotation around 4 kpc. This follows from the fact that the Hercules stream looks like a typical signature of the outer Lindblad resonance of the bar. As we showed recently, reconciling this local stream with a slow bar would ne…
Semi-Analytic Modeling of Dark Matter Subhalo Encounters with Thin Stellar Streams: Statistical Predictions for GD-1-like Streams in CDM
C.N. Yang Institute for Theoretical Physics, Stony Brook University（纽约州立大学石溪分校杨振宁理论物理研究所）；Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of California, Irvine（加州大学尔湾分校物理与天文学系）；Center for Computational Astrophysics, Flatiron Institute（平顿研究所计算天体物理学中心）
We use the photometric metallicities provided by the panoramic Pristine survey to study the veracity and derive the metallicities of the numerous stellar streams found by the application of the STREAMFINDER algorithm to the Gaia EDR3 data. All 26 streams present in Pristine show a clear metallicity distribution function, which provides an independent check of the reality of these structures, supporting the reliability of STREAMFINDER in finding streams and the power of Pristine to measure precise metallicities. We further present 6 candidate structures with coherent phase-space and metallicity…
