Tails from the Orphanage

Abstract

Examining a portion of the northern Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) footprint, we detect at least three and possibly seven halo debris streams. One of these (PS1-D) was recently detected in the Pan-STARRS1 $3\pi$ survey, and the remaining two are also evident as extensions of the SDSS detections. All of these streams are metal poor and are found at a distance of around $21\pm 5$ kpc. The streams are between 65\arcdeg~ and 70\arcdeg~ in length, oriented almost north-south, and are nearly parallel and somewhat convergent with the neighboring Orphan stream. Surface densities ranging from 1.5 to 0.5 stars per square degree down to $g=21.7$ correspond to surface brightnesses between 35 and 37 mag per square arcsecond. The streams each appear to be more than 300 pc across, suggesting either dwarf/ultrafaint galaxy progenitors or long-term heating of very ancient globular cluster streams. The orbits of all but one of these streams appear to be nearly radial, and the orbit normals suggest that all of the streams are part of the Vast Polar Structure, a relatively narrow plane that contains most of the known satellite galaxies, globular clusters, and stellar streams.

3 pages, 5 figures, accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal

References in corpus (22)

• Maps of Dust IR Emission for Use in Estimation of Reddening and CMBR Foregrounds
• Measuring Reddening with SDSS Stellar Spectra and Recalibrating SFD
• The Field of Streams: Sagittarius and its Siblings
• The VPOS: a vast polar structure of satellite galaxies, globular clusters and streams around the Milky Way
• An Orphan in the "Field of Streams"
• Four New Stellar Debris Streams in the Galactic Halo
• Detection of a 60 Degree-Long Dwarf Galaxy Debris Stream
• Globular Cluster Streams as Galactic High-Precision Scales - The Poster Child Palomar 5
• Clumpy Streams from Clumpy Halos: Detecting Missing Satellites with Cold Stellar Structures
• Substructure in Tidal Streams; Tributaries in the Anticenter Ring
• The Orbit of the Orphan Stream
• A Synoptic Map of Halo Substructures from the Pan-STARRS1 3π Survey
• Stellar Streams and Clouds in the Galactic Halo
• The mechanics of tidal streams
• Star Stream Folding by Dark Galactic Sub-Halos
• Tracing the Orphan Stream to 55 kpc with RR Lyrae Stars
• On Rings and Streams in the Galactic Anti-Center
• Another Look at the EBS: A Stellar Debris Stream and a Possible Progenitor
• Two New Halo Debris Streams in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
• An Orphan No Longer? Detection of the Southern Orphan Stream and a Candidate Progenitor
• Kinematically Detected Halo Streams
• Evidence That Hydra I is a Tidally Disrupting Milky Way Dwarf Galaxy

Cited by in corpus (10)

• galstreams: A Library of Milky Way Stellar Stream Footprints and Tracks
• The information content in cold stellar streams
• Fourteen candidate RR Lyrae star streams in the inner Galaxy
• Proper Motions of Stellar Streams Discovered in the Dark Energy Survey
• The Milky Way's stellar streams and globular clusters do not align in a Vast Polar Structure
• LMC-driven anisotropic boosts in stream--subhalo interactions
• RR Lyrae stars as probes of the outer Galactic halo: Chemical and kinematic analysis of a pilot sample
• An Orbit Fit to Likely Hermus Stream Stars
• Fitting the density substructure of the stellar halo with MilkyWay@home
• Joint Survey Processing II: Stellar Proper Motions in the COSMOS Field, from Hubble Space Telescope ACS and Subaru Telescope HSC Observations