Improved particle spray algorithm for modeling globular cluster streams

Abstract

Stellar streams that emerge from globular clusters (GCs) are thin stellar structures spread along the orbits of progenitor clusters. Numerical modeling of these streams is essential for understanding their interaction with the host galaxy's mass distribution. Traditional methods are either computationally expensive or oversimplified, motivating us to develop a fast and accurate approach using a particle spray algorithm. By conducting a series of N-body simulations of GCs orbiting a host galaxy, we find that the position and velocity distributions of newly-escaped stream particles are consistent across various GC masses and orbital parameters. Based on these distributions, we develop a new algorithm that avoids computing the detailed internal cluster dynamics by directly drawing tracer particles from these distributions. This algorithm correctly reproduces the action space distribution of stream particles and achieves a 10% accuracy in stream morphology and velocities compared to N-body simulations. To facilitate broader use, we have implemented this algorithm in galactic dynamics codes agama, gala, galax, and galpy.

18 pages, 11 figures, accepted for publication in ApJS. Online notebooks providing instructions on this algorithm are available at https://github.com/ybillchen/particle_spray

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Cited by in corpus (8)

• StarStream: Automatic detection algorithm for stellar streams
• Measurement of Substructure from the Kinematics of the GD-1 Stellar Stream
• Semi-Analytic Modeling of Dark Matter Subhalo Encounters with Thin Stellar Streams: Statistical Predictions for GD-1-like Streams in CDM
• DELVE-ing into the Milky Way's Globular Clusters: Assessing extra-tidal features in NGC 5897, NGC 7492, and testing detectability with deeper photometry
• Towards characterizing dark matter subhalo perturbations in stellar streams with graph neural networks
• The dynamical memory of tidal stellar streams: Joint inference of the Galactic potential and the progenitor of GD-1 with flow matching
• Constraining the population of dark matter halo shapes using hierarchical inference with extragalactic stellar streams
• No Stream Left Unscathed: The imprint of a host galaxy