Detecting the disruption of dark-matter halos with stellar streams

Abstract

Narrow stellar streams in the Milky Way halo are uniquely sensitive to dark-matter subhalos, but many of these subhalos may be tidally disrupted. I calculate the interaction between stellar and dark-matter streams using analytical and $N$-body calculations, showing that disrupting objects can be detected as low-concentration subhalos. Through this effect, we can constrain the lumpiness of the halo as well as the orbit and present position of individual dark-matter streams. This will have profound implications for the formation of halos and for direct and indirect-detection dark-matter searches.

PRL in press; 4 pages; all code available at https://github.com/jobovy/stream-stream

References in corpus (6)

• galpy: A Python Library for Galactic Dynamics
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• Forensics of Subhalo-Stream Encounters: The Three Phases of Gap Growth
• Properties of Dark Subhaloes from Gaps in Tidal Streams
• Initial conditions for disc galaxies
• The Graininess of Dark Matter Haloes

Cited by in corpus (38)

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• Gravitational probes of dark matter physics
• Overview of the DESI Milky Way Survey
• A sharper view of Pal 5's tails: Discovery of stream perturbations with a novel non-parametric technique
• The mass of our Milky Way
• Linear perturbation theory for tidal streams and the small-scale CDM power spectrum
• Extended stellar systems in the solar neighborhood - II. Discovery of a nearby 120° stellar stream in Gaia DR2
• Signatures of Velocity-Dependent Dark Matter Self-Interactions in Milky Way-mass Halos
• Broken into Pieces: ATLAS and Aliqa Uma as One Single Stream
• The effect of the deforming dark matter haloes of the Milky Way and the Large Magellanic Cloud on the Orphan-Chenab stream
• A closer look at the spur, blob, wiggle, and gaps in GD-1
• Searching for the GD-1 Stream Progenitor in Gaia DR2 with Direct N-body Simulations
• On the Power Spectrum of Dark Matter Substructure in Strong Gravitational Lenses
• Direct Detection of Dark Matter Substructure in Strong Lens Images with Convolutional Neural Networks
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• Feeling the pull, a study of natural Galactic accelerometers. II: kinematics and mass of the delicate stellar stream of the Palomar 5 globular cluster
• First Results on Dark Matter Substructure from Astrometric Weak Lensing
• Stellar Wakes from Dark Matter Subhalos
• Beyond subhalos: Probing the collective effect of the Universe's small-scale structure with gravitational lensing
• And In The Darkness Unbind Them: High-Resolution Simulations of Dark Matter Subhalo Disruption in a Milky Way-like Tidal Field
• Extracting the Subhalo Mass Function from Strong Lens Images with Image Segmentation
• Hubble Space Telescope Proper Motions of Individual Stars in Stellar Streams: Orphan, Sagittarius, Lethe, and the New "Parallel" Stream
• Quantifying the power spectrum of small-scale structure in semi-analytic galaxies
• ALP dark matter with non-periodic potentials: parametric resonance, halo formation and gravitational signatures
• Effects of chaos on the detectability of stellar streams
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• Decoding Dark Matter Substructure without Supervision
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• $S^5$: New insights from deep spectroscopic observations of the tidal tails of the globular clusters NGC 1261 and NGC 1904
• LMC-driven anisotropic boosts in stream--subhalo interactions
• A Cold Stellar Stream in Pegasus
• Prospects for Detecting Gaps in Globular Cluster Stellar Streams in External Galaxies with the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope
• Trojan globular clusters: radial migration via trapping in bar resonances
• An Orbit Fit to Likely Hermus Stream Stars
• Toward the fabric of the Milky Way I. The density of disk streams from a local $250^3$ pc${}^3$ volume
• Towards characterizing dark matter subhalo perturbations in stellar streams with graph neural networks