Simulating tidal streams in a high resolution dark matter halo

Abstract

We simulate tidal streams in the presence and absence of substructures inside the zero redshift snapshot of the Via Lactea II (VL-2) simulation. A halo finder is used to remove and isolate the subhalos found inside the high resolution dark matter halo of VL-2, and the potentials for both the main halo and all the subhalos are constructed individually using the self-consistent field (SCF) method. This allows us to make direct comparison of tidal streams between a smooth halo and a lumpy halo without assuming idealized profiles or triaxial fits. We simulate the kinematics of a star cluster starting with the same orbital position but two different velocities. Although these two orbits are only moderately eccentric and have similar apo- and pericentric distances, we find that the two streams have very different morphologies. We conclude that our model of the potential of VL-2 can provide insights about tidal streams that have not been explored by previous studies using idealized or axisymmetric models.

11 pages, 15 figures. ApJ accepted. Updated to match published version

References in corpus (8)

• Detection of a 63 Degree Cold Stellar Stream in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
• Dark matter subhalos and the dwarf satellites of the Milky Way
• On the structure of tidal tails
• Forensics of Subhalo-Stream Encounters: The Three Phases of Gap Growth
• The statistics of the subhalo abundance of dark matter haloes
• Milky Way Mass and Potential Recovery Using Tidal Streams in a Realistic Halo
• The Graininess of Dark Matter Haloes
• An Orbit Fit for the Grillmair Dionatos Cold Stellar Stream

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Variations in the width, density, and direction of the Palomar 5 tidal tails
• Quantifying tidal stream disruption in a simulated Milky Way
• Implications of the lens redshift distribution of strong lensing systems: cosmological parameters and the global properties of early-type galaxies
• Star Streams and the Assembly History of the Galaxy