Fitting orbits to tidal streams

Abstract

Recent years have seen the discovery of many tidal streams through the Galaxy. Relatively straightforward observations of a stream allow one to deduce three phase-space coordinates of an orbit. An algorithm is presented that reconstructs the missing phase-space coordinates from these data. The reconstruction starts from assumed values of the Galactic potential and a distance to one point on the orbit, but with noise-free data the condition that energy be conserved on the orbit enables one to reject incorrect assumptions. The performance of the algorithm is investigated when errors are added to the input data that are comparable to those in published data for the streams of Pal 5. It is found that the algorithm returns distances and proper motions that are accurate to of order one percent, and enables one to reject quite reasonable but incorrect trial potentials. In practical applications it will be important to minimize errors in the input data, and there is considerable scope for doing this.

6 pages MNRAS in press

References in corpus (8)

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• The extended tails of Palomar 5: A ten degree arc of globular cluster tidal debris
• Fossil Signatures of Ancient Accretion Events in the Halo
• The Origin of the Bifurcation in the Sagittarius Stream
• A Two Micron All-Sky Survey View of the Sagittarius Dwarf Galaxy: II. Swope Telescope Spectroscopy of M Giant Stars in the Dynamically Cold Sagittarius Tidal Stream
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• The Tidal Tails of NGC 5466

Cited by in corpus (27)

• Dynamical modeling of tidal streams
• Stream-orbit misalignment I: The dangers of orbit-fitting
• $S^5$: Probing the Milky Way and Magellanic Clouds potentials with the 6-D map of the Orphan-Chenab stream
• galstreams: A Library of Milky Way Stellar Stream Footprints and Tracks
• Dipping Our Toes in the Water: First Models of GD-1 as a Stream
• On feathers, bifurcations and shells: the dynamics of tidal streams across the mass scale
• Stream-orbit misalignment II: A new algorithm to constrain the Galactic potential
• Kinematics and simulations of the stellar stream in the halo of the Umbrella Galaxy
• Locating the orbits delineated by tidal streams
• Constraining the Milky Way Halo Shape Using Thin Streams
• Probabilistic model for constraining the Galactic potential using tidal streams
• Fitting orbits to tidal streams with proper motions
• The evolution of streams in a time-dependent potential
• Development of multiple tidal tails around globular clusters and dwarf satellite galaxies
• Star Streams and the Assembly History of the Galaxy
• Star Streams in Triaxial Isochrone Potentials with Sub-Halos
• GCN: a gaseous Galactic halo stream?
• Tidal Debris as a Dark Matter Probe
• STRRINGS: STReams in Residual Images of Nearby GalaxieS
• Dynamical Properties of Collisionless Star Streams
• Milky Way Halo Vibrations and Incommensurate Stream Velocities
• MilkyWay@home: Harnessing volunteer computers to constrain dark matter in the Milky Way
• On the behaviour of streams in angle and frequency spaces in different potentials
• Inferring the dynamics of stellar streams via distance gradients
• Inferring the density and membership of stellar streams with flexible models: The GD-1 stream in Gaia Data Release 3
• The Galactic potential and dark matter density from angular stellar accelerations
• Constraining the population of dark matter halo shapes using hierarchical inference with extragalactic stellar streams