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.

arXiv commentApJ subm

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• The mass of our Milky Way
• Census and classification of low-surface-brightness structures in nearby early-type galaxies from the MATLAS survey
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• The Structural and Kinematic Evolution of Central Star Clusters in Dwarf Galaxies and Their Dependence on Dark Matter Halo Profiles
• A Cold Stellar Stream in Pegasus
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• Orbital phase-driven biases in Galactic mass constraints from stellar streams
• Fitting the density substructure of the stellar halo with MilkyWay@home
• 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
• Accreted Globular Clusters in External Galaxies: Why Adaptive Dynamics is not the Solution
• 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