Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy
Scientific paper
Dec 2007
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2007aas...211.2801s&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #211, #28.01; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 39, p.778
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astronomy
Scientific paper
In the past decade, surveys of the stellar component of the Galaxy such as SDSS and 2MASS have revealed a number of stellar streams. Current and future observations are rapidly increasing the precision and quantity of data available, raising the possibility of using tidal streams to constrain the distribution of dark matter in the halo. Simulations of hierarchical structure formation in ΛCDM cosmologies predict that the dark matter halo of a galaxy like the Milky Way contains a smooth component as well as hundreds of subhalos with masses of 10^8 solar masses and greater, and it has been suggested that the existence of coherent tidal streams is incompatible with the expected abundance of substructure. We investigate the properties of tidal streams arising from the disruption of satellites in a variety of dark matter halo models. In general, we find that the halo shape and the specific orbital path more strongly determine the degree of disruption of the satellite than does the presence or absence of substructure, and that in some scenarios the influence of substructure on the resulting tidal debris is negligible. The presence of substructure typically leads to an increase in the degree of clumpiness of the tidal debris in a sky projection, and differences in the location of the debris compared to the results of the smooth halo model, the latter of which may have important implications for the interpretation and modeling of observed tidal streams. In addition, we identify a unique signature of the presence of substructure in the halo, which should be detectable by current and upcoming surveys. In contrast with the results of previous work, we find that a detection of a coherent tidal stream would not be inconsistent with predicted levels of substructure.
Siegal-Gaskins Jennifer M.
Valluri Monica
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