Origins and Interpretation of Tidal Debris

Abstract

The stellar debris structures that have been discovered around the Milky Way and other galaxies are thought to be formed from the disruption of satellite stellar systems --- dwarf galaxies or globular clusters --- by galactic tidal fields. The total stellar mass in these structures is typically tiny compared to the galaxy around which they are found, and it is hence easy to dismiss them as inconsequential. However, they are remarkably useful as probes of a galaxy's history (as described in this chapter) and mass distribution (covered in a companion chapter in this volume). This power is actually a consequence of their apparent insignificance: their low contribution to the overall mass makes the physics that describes them both elegant and simple and this means that their observed properties are relatively easy to understand and interpret.

Chapter~6 from the volume "Tidal Streams in the Local Group and Beyond: Observations and Implications"; ed. Newberg, H.~J., \& Carlin, J.~L.\ 2016, Springer International Publishing, Astrophysics and Space Science Library, 420\\ ISBN 978-3-319-19335-9; DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-19336-6\_1

References in corpus (17)

• The accretion origin of the Milky Way's stellar halo
• Tracing Galaxy Formation with Stellar Halos II: Relating Substructure in Phase- and Abundance-Space to Accretion Histories
• The Dual Origin of Stellar Halos
• "Skinny Milky Way, Please", says Sagittarius
• The Galaxy and its stellar halo: insights on their formation from a hybrid cosmological approach
• N-body simulations of gravitational dynamics
• Dynamical modeling of tidal streams
• The mechanics of tidal streams
• The Nature and Origin of Substructure in the Outskirts of M31. I. Surveying the Stellar Content with HST/ACS
• Disassembling the Galaxy with angle-action coordinates
• On feathers, bifurcations and shells: the dynamics of tidal streams across the mass scale
• The Stellar Content of Galaxy Halos: A Comparison between LambdaCDM Models and Observations of M31
• The Nature and Origin of Substructure in the Outskirts of M31 -- II. Detailed Star Formation Histories
• Actions, angles and frequencies for numerically integrated orbits
• Creating mock catalogues of stellar haloes from cosmological simulations
• Reconstructing the Accretion History of the Galactic Stellar Halo from Chemical Abundance Ratio Distributions
• Systematic Problems With Using Dark Matter Simulations to Model Stellar Halos

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Streams, substructures and the early history of the Milky Way
• Common origin for Hercules-Aquila and Virgo Clouds in Gaia DR2
• The dark side of FIRE: predicting the population of dark matter subhaloes around Milky Way-mass galaxies
• On the Fast Track: Rapid construction of stellar stream paths
• DELVE-ing into the Milky Way's Globular Clusters: Assessing extra-tidal features in NGC 5897, NGC 7492, and testing detectability with deeper photometry