Modeling the gravitational potential of a cosmological dark matter halo with stellar streams

Abstract

Stellar streams result from the tidal disruption of satellites and star clusters as they orbit a host galaxy, and can be very sensitive probes of the gravitational potential of the host system. We select and study narrow stellar streams formed in a Milky-Way-like dark matter halo of the Aquarius suite of cosmological simulations, to determine if these streams can be used to constrain the present day characteristic parameters of the halo's gravitational potential. We find that orbits integrated in static spherical and triaxial NFW potentials both reproduce the locations and kinematics of the various streams reasonably well. To quantify this further, we determine the best-fit potential parameters by maximizing the amount of clustering of the stream stars in the space of their actions. We show that using our set of Aquarius streams, we recover a mass profile that is consistent with the spherically-averaged dark matter profile of the host halo, although we ignored both triaxiality and time evolution in the fit. This gives us confidence that such methods can be applied to the many streams that will be discovered by the Gaia mission to determine the gravitational potential of our Galaxy.

ApJ subm

References in corpus (9)

• The accretion origin of the Milky Way's stellar halo
• The Shape of the Gravitational Potential in Cold Dark Matter Halos
• The fine-grained phase-space structure of Cold Dark Matter halos
• Generation of mock tidal streams
• Milky Way Mass and Potential Recovery Using Tidal Streams in a Realistic Halo
• On feathers, bifurcations and shells: the dynamics of tidal streams across the mass scale
• An Orbit Fit for the Grillmair Dionatos Cold Stellar Stream
• Action-space clustering of tidal streams to infer the Galactic potential
• Inferring the gravitational potential of the Milky Way with a few precisely measured stars

Cited by in corpus (16)

• The mass of the Milky Way out to 100 kpc using halo stars
• Dynamical Evolution of Multiple-Population Globular Clusters
• Milky Way Mass with K Giants and BHB Stars Using LAMOST, SDSS/SEGUE, and Gaia: 3D Spherical Jeans Equation and Tracer Mass Estimator
• On the stability of tidal streams in action space
• Enlightening the dynamical evolution of Galactic open clusters: an approach using Gaia DR3 and analytical descriptions
• Charting Galactic Accelerations with Stellar Streams and Machine Learning
• A Cold Stellar Stream in Pegasus
• Conservation of radial actions in time-dependent spherical potentials
• Orbital phase-driven biases in Galactic mass constraints from stellar streams
• Building an Acceleration Ladder with Tidal Streams and Pulsar Timing
• An Orbit Fit to Likely Hermus Stream Stars
• Photometric calibration in u-band using blue halo stars
• The Influence of Subhaloes on Host Halo Properties
• Orbital dynamics in galactic potentials under mass transfer
• rrlfe: Software for Generating and Applying Metallicity Calibrations for RR Lyrae Variable Stars Across a Wide Range of Phases and Temperatures
• No Stream Left Unscathed: The imprint of a host galaxy