On the Stability of Tidal Streams
arXiv:1103.3276 · doi:10.1111/j.1365-2966.2011.18811.x
Abstract
We explore the stability of tidal streams to perturbations, motivated by recent claims that the clumpy structure of the stellar streams surrounding the globular cluster Palomar 5 are the result of gravitational instability. We calculate the Jeans length of tidal streams by treating them as a thin expanding cylinder of collisionless matter. We also find a general relation between the density and the velocity dispersion inside a stream, which is used to determine the longitudinal Jeans criterion. Our analytic results are checked by following the time evolution of the phase space density within streams using numerical simulations. We conclude that tidal streams within our galactic halo are stable on all length scales and over all timescales.
Accepted for publication in MNRAS
References in corpus (6)
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Cited by in corpus (10)
- Globular Cluster Streams as Galactic High-Precision Scales - The Poster Child Palomar 5
- More on the structure of tidal tails
- The Pal 5 Star Stream Gaps
- Oscillations and stability of polytropic filaments
- Clumpy streams in a smooth dark halo: the case of Palomar 5
- Local stability of a gravitating filament: a dispersion relation
- Novel Adaptive softening for collisionless N-body simulations: Eliminating spurious halos
- Stability of Rotating Self-Gravitating Filaments:Stability of Rotating Self-Gravitating Filaments: Effects of Magnetic Field
- Instability Analysis of Cylindrical Stellar Object in Brans-Dicke Gravity
- Tidal Limit of Stellar Systems in Two-Power Density Models