An Upper Limit on the Granularity of the Local Stellar Halo

Abstract

I use the statistical properties of 4588 nearby halo stars to show that if the local stellar halo is composed of cold streams from disrupted dwarf satellites as is predicted by popular cosmologies, then at 95% confidence there are at least 1350 such streams. Moreover, no stream can contain more than 2.3% of the local stars, while average streams must contain less than 0.08%.

Submitted to ApJ Letters, 6 pages

References in corpus (3)

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• Improved Astrometry and Photometry for the Luyten Catalog. II. Faint Stars and the Revised Catalog
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• Halo streams in the 7th SDSS data release
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• New Signatures of the Milky Way Formation in the Local Halo and Inner Halo Streamers in the Era of Gaia
• Spatial and Velocity clumping in an SDSS blue horizontal branch star catalogue
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• New Models for a Triaxial Milky Way Spheroid and Effect on the Microlensing Optical Depth to the Large Magellanic Cloud