Publications (17)
Statistics of the Chemical Composition of Solar Analog Stars and Links to Planet Formation
Jacob Nibauer, Eric J. Baxter, Bhuvnesh Jain +3
The Sun has been found to be depleted in refractory (rock-forming) elements relative to nearby solar analogs, suggesting a potential indicator of planet formation. Given the small…
The low-mass and structured stellar halo of M83 argues against a merger origin for its starburst and extended neutral hydrogen disk
Eric F. Bell, Benjamin Harmsen, Matthew Cosby +12
A merger origin has been suggested for M83's massive, metal-rich extended HI disk and nuclear starburst. We observe M83's stellar halo to test this idea. We train nearest-neighbor…
LIGHTS. The Thin Encircling Stellar Stream of NGC 3938
Dennis Zaritsky, Jacob Nibauer, Giulia Golini +17
We present a stellar stream found in images of the nearby, nearly face-on, late-type galaxy, NGC 3938 obtained for the LBT Imaging of Galactic Halos and Tidal Structures (LIGHTS) s…
Charting Galactic Accelerations with Stellar Streams and Machine Learning
Jacob Nibauer, Vasily Belokurov, Miles Cranmer +2
We present a data-driven method for reconstructing the galactic acceleration field from phase-space measurements of stellar streams. Our approach is based on a flexible and differe…
Potamides: Mapping Dark Matter Halo Shapes from Stellar Stream Tracks in the Local Universe
Sirui Wu, Nathaniel Starkman, Sarah Pearson +3
Stellar streams trace the gravitational potential of their host galaxies and offer a direct probe of dark matter halo geometry. Cosmological simulations predict that halo shapes de…
The Statistics of Extended Debris Disks Measured with Gaia and Planck
Jacob Nibauer, Eric Baxter, Bhuvnesh Jain
Thermal emission from debris disks around stars has been measured using targeted and resolved observations. We present an alternative, likelihood-based approach in which temperatur…
: Hamiltonian Perturbation Theory for Stellar Streams in Flexible Potentials with Differentiable Simulations
Jacob Nibauer, Ana Bonaca, David N. Spergel +4
Stellar streams retain a memory of their gravitational interactions with small-scale perturbations. While perturbative models for streams have been formulated in action-angle coord…
Testing Dark Matter with Generative Models for Extragalactic Stellar Streams
Jacob Nibauer, Sarah Pearson
Upcoming ground and space-based surveys are poised to illuminate low surface brightness tidal features, providing a new observable connection to dark matter physics. From imaging o…
Galactic Accelerations from the GD-1 Stream Suggest a Tilted Dark Matter Halo
Jacob Nibauer, Ana Bonaca
Cold dark matter halos are expected to be triaxial and often tilted relative to the stellar disk. Stellar streams provide a sensitive tracer of the Milky Way's halo shape, though m…
Slant, Fan, and Narrow: the Response of Stellar Streams to a Tilting Galactic Disk
Jacob Nibauer, Ana Bonaca, Mariangela Lisanti +2
Stellar streams are sensitive tracers of the gravitational potential, which is typically assumed to be static in the inner Galaxy. However, massive mergers like Gaia-Sausage-Encela…
The Binary Populations of Stellar Streams are Set by Cluster Dynamics
Anya Phillips, Charlie Conroy, Jacob Nibauer +5
We present a suite of direct N-body simulations of low mass () globular cluster streams initialized with observationally-motivated binary demographics in order to…
The Simons Observatory: Galactic Science Goals and Forecasts
Brandon S. Hensley, Susan E. Clark, Valentina Fanfani +31
Observing in six frequency bands from 27 to 280 GHz over a large sky area, the Simons Observatory (SO) is poised to address many questions in Galactic astrophysics in addition to i…
Measurement of Substructure from the Kinematics of the GD-1 Stellar Stream
Jacob Nibauer, Ana Bonaca, Adrian M. Price-Whelan +2
Stellar streams are sensitive tracers of low-mass dark matter subhalos and provide a means to test the Cold Dark Matter (CDM) paradigm on small scales. In this work, we connect the…
No Stream Left Unscathed: The imprint of a host galaxy
Arpit Arora, Peter S. Ferguson, Jacob Nibauer +11
Stellar streams from disrupted globular clusters are excellent probes of dark matter (DM) subhalos. Observed Milky Way streams display a remarkable diversity of features: spurs, ga…
Stream Members Only: Data-Driven Characterization of Stellar Streams with Mixture Density Networks
Nathaniel Starkman, Jacob Nibauer, Jo Bovy +4
Stellar streams are sensitive probes of the Milky Way's gravitational potential. The mean track of a stream constrains global properties of the potential, while its fine-grained su…
Constraining the Gravitational Potential from the Projected Morphology of Extragalactic Tidal Streams
Jacob Nibauer, Ana Bonaca, Kathryn V. Johnston
The positions and velocities of stellar streams have been used to constrain the mass and shape of the Milky Way's dark matter halo. Several extragalactic streams have already been…
A Path to an All-Sky Survey with Roman
Jiwon Jesse Han, Anirudh Chiti, Kai-Feng Chen +93
A deep, space-based, all-sky near-infrared survey carried out with the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope would constitute a foundational astronomical infrastructure for decades to…