Galactic potential constraints from clustering in action space of combined stellar stream data

Abstract

Stream stars removed by tides from their progenitor satellite galaxy or globular cluster act as a group of test particles on neighboring orbits, probing the gravitational field of the Milky Way. While constraints from individual streams have been shown to be susceptible to biases, combining several streams from orbits with various distances reduces these biases. We fit a common gravitational potential to multiple stellar streams simultaneously by maximizing the clustering of the stream stars in action space. We apply this technique to members of the GD-1, Pal 5, Orphan and Helmi streams, exploiting both the individual and combined data sets. We describe the Galactic potential with a Stäckel model, and vary up to five parameters simultaneously. We find that we can only constrain the enclosed mass, and that the strongest constraints come from the GD-1, Pal 5 and Orphan streams whose combined data set yields $M(<20\mathrm{kpc})=2.96_{-0.26}^{+0.25}\times 10^{11}{M}_{\odot }$. When including the Helmi stream in the data set, the mass uncertainty increases to $M(<20\mathrm{kpc})=3.12_{-0.46}^{+3.21}\times 10^{11}{M}_{\odot }$.

arXiv comment25 pages, 15 figures. Accepted for publication in MNRAS

References in corpus (80)

• Gaia Data Release 2. Summary of the contents and survey properties
• The SIMBAD astronomical database
• Local Kinematics and the Local Standard of Rest
• galpy: A Python Library for Galactic Dynamics
• The mass distribution and gravitational potential of the Milky Way
• The Field of Streams: Sagittarius and its Siblings
• Debris streams in the solar neighbourhood as relicts from the formation of the Milky Way
• AGAMA: Action-based galaxy modelling architecture
• The Sagittarius Dwarf Galaxy: a Model for Evolution in a Triaxial Milky Way Halo
• The Radial Velocity Experiment (RAVE): Fifth Data Release
• Detection of massive tidal tails around the globular cluster Pal 5 with SDSS commissioning data
• Constraining the Milky Way potential with a 6-D phase-space map of the GD-1 stellar stream
• The Circular Velocity Curve of the Milky Way from $5$ to $25$ kpc
• The total mass of the Large Magellanic Cloud from its perturbation on the Orphan stream
• Detection of a 63 Degree Cold Stellar Stream in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
• The extended tails of Palomar 5: A ten degree arc of globular cluster tidal debris
• Proper motions and dynamics of the Milky Way globular cluster system from Gaia DR2
• Stellar Streams Discovered in the Dark Energy Survey
• The stellar halo of the Galaxy
• "Skinny Milky Way, Please", says Sagittarius
• Detection of a 60 Degree-Long Dwarf Galaxy Debris Stream
• Globular Clusters with Tidal Tails: Deep Two-Color Star Counts
• Mass and shape of the Milky Way's dark matter halo with globular clusters from Gaia and Hubble
• Tidal Streams as Probes of the Galactic Potential
• The Spur and the Gap in GD-1: Dynamical evidence for a dark substructure in the Milky Way halo
• Globular Cluster Streams as Galactic High-Precision Scales - The Poster Child Palomar 5
• Ghostly Tributaries to the Milky Way: Charting the Halo's Stellar Streams with the Gaia DR2 catalogue
• Globular clusters in the outer Galactic halo: new HST/ACS imaging of 6 globular clusters and the Galactic globular cluster age-metallicity relation
• One large blob and many streams frosting the nearby stellar halo in Gaia DR2
• The shape of the inner Milky Way halo from observations of the Pal 5 and GD-1 stellar streams
• The Streams of the Gaping Abyss: A population of entangled stellar streams surrounding the Inner Galaxy
• Machine-Learned Identification of RR Lyrae Stars from Sparse, Multi-band Data: the PS1 Sample
• Detection of a 45 Degree Tidal Stream Associated with the Globular Cluster NGC 5466
• Evidence for an Intermediate-Mass Milky Way from Gaia DR2 Halo Globular Cluster Motions
• Mapping the Stellar Halo with the H3 Spectroscopic Survey
• Constraints on the shape of the Milky Way dark matter halo from the Sagittarius stream
• A 22 Degree Tidal Tail for Palomar 5
• Characterization and history of the Helmi streams with Gaia DR2
• A sharper view of Pal 5's tails: Discovery of stream perturbations with a novel non-parametric technique
• Piercing the Milky Way: an all-sky view of the Orphan Stream
• Constraining the Milky Way Halo Potential with the GD-1 stellar stream
• The Orbit of the Orphan Stream
• Off the beaten path: Gaia reveals GD-1 stars outside of the main stream
• The Southern Stellar Stream Spectroscopic Survey ($S^5$): Overview, Target Selection, Data Reduction, Validation, and Early Science
• A Synoptic Map of Halo Substructures from the Pan-STARRS1 3π Survey
• SDSS-V: Pioneering Panoptic Spectroscopy
• A review of action estimation methods for galactic dynamics
• The Dependence of Subhalo Abundance on Halo Concentration
• Stream-orbit misalignment I: The dangers of orbit-fitting
• Extended stellar systems in the solar neighborhood - II. Discovery of a nearby 120° stellar stream in Gaia DR2
• Gaps in globular cluster streams: giant molecular clouds can cause them too
• Tidal debris morphology and the orbits of satellite galaxies
• The Pal 5 Star Stream Gaps
• The PAndAS Field of Streams: stellar structures in the Milky Way halo toward Andromeda and Triangulum
• Milky Way Mass and Potential Recovery Using Tidal Streams in a Realistic Halo
• Absolute HST Proper Motion (HSTPROMO) of Distant Milky Way Globular Clusters: Galactocentric Space Velocities and the Milky Way Mass
• Discovery of a cold stellar stream in the ATLAS DR1 data
• Disassembling the Galaxy with angle-action coordinates
• On feathers, bifurcations and shells: the dynamics of tidal streams across the mass scale
• Fourteen candidate RR Lyrae star streams in the inner Galaxy
• Stream-orbit misalignment II: A new algorithm to constrain the Galactic potential
• Effects of baryonic and dark matter substructure on the Pal 5 stream
• Gaia Data Release 2: Summary of the variability processing & analysis results
• Dynamics of stream-subhalo interactions
• An Orbit Fit for the Grillmair Dionatos Cold Stellar Stream
• Serendipitous Discovery of a Thin Stellar Stream near the Galactic Bulge in the Pan-STARRS1 3Pi Survey
• Action-space clustering of tidal streams to infer the Galactic potential
• High-resolution spectroscopy of the GD-1 stellar stream localizes the perturber near the orbital plane of Sagittarius
• Stellar streams as gravitational experiments II. Asymmetric tails of globular cluster streams
• A comprehensive comparison between APOGEE and LAMOST: Radial Velocities and Atmospheric Stellar Parameters
• Kinematics of the Palomar 5 stellar stream from RR Lyrae stars
• Feeling the pull, a study of natural Galactic accelerometers. II: kinematics and mass of the delicate stellar stream of the Palomar 5 globular cluster
• Modeling the gravitational potential of a cosmological dark matter halo with stellar streams
• A statistical method for measuring the Galactic potential and testing gravity with cold tidal streams
• Bayes versus the virial theorem: inferring the potential of a galaxy from a kinematical snapshot
• The Virgo Overdensity Explained
• GD-1: the relic of an old metal-poor globular cluster
• Inferring the Galactic potential with Gaia and friends: synergies with other surveys
• Gravitational Potential from small-scale clustering in action space: Application to Gaia DR2
• Candidate members of the Pal 5, GD-1, Cetus Polar, and Orphan tidal stellar halo streams from Sdss DR9, Lamost DR3 and APOGEE catalogues

Cited by in corpus (22)

• Quantifying the impact of the Large Magellanic Cloud on the structure of the Milky Way's dark matter halo using Basis Function Expansions
• $S^5$: Probing the Milky Way and Magellanic Clouds potentials with the 6-D map of the Orphan-Chenab stream
• galstreams: A Library of Milky Way Stellar Stream Footprints and Tracks
• Orbital Clustering Identifies the Origins of Galactic Stellar Streams
• Dynamical Evolution of Multiple-Population Globular Clusters
• Via Machinae: Searching for Stellar Streams using Unsupervised Machine Learning
• On the stability of tidal streams in action space
• The Hough Stream Spotter: A New Method for Detecting Linear Structure in Resolved Stars and Application to the Stellar Halo of M31
• Shapes of Milky-Way-Mass Galaxies with Self-Interacting Dark Matter
• Charting Galactic Accelerations with Stellar Streams and Machine Learning
• The ACTIONFINDER: An unsupervised deep learning algorithm for calculating actions and the acceleration field from a set of orbit segments
• A giant thin stellar stream in the Coma Galaxy Cluster
• Time evolution of gaps in stellar streams in axisymmetric Stäckel potentials
• Stellar Streams in the Galactic Disk: Predicted Lifetimes and Their Utility in Measuring the Galactic Potential
• Modelling the Track of the GD-1 Stellar Stream Inside a Host with a Fermionic Dark Matter Core-Halo Distribution
• Weakly-Supervised Anomaly Detection in the Milky Way
• Cosmological Simulations of Stellar Halos with Gaia Sausage-Enceladus Analogues: Two Sausages, One Bun?
• Orbital phase-driven biases in Galactic mass constraints from stellar streams
• Building an Acceleration Ladder with Tidal Streams and Pulsar Timing
• Minimum-entropy constraints on galactic potentials
• walter: A Tool for Predicting Resolved Stellar Population Observations with Applications to the Roman Space Telescope
• GalPort: Investigation of the bar in action-angle space