Galaxy Disruption in a Halo of Dark Matter

Abstract

The relics of disrupted satellite galaxies around the Milky Way and Andromeda have been found, but direct evidence of a satellite galaxy in the early stages of being disrupted has remained elusive. We have discovered a dwarf satellite galaxy in the process of being torn apart by gravitational tidal forces as it merges with a larger galaxy's dark matter halo. Our results illustrate the morphological transformation of dwarf galaxies by tidal interaction and the continued build-up of galaxy halos.

7 pages, Latex, 4 figures, to appear in Science v301 p5637

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Cited by in corpus (32)

• Tracing Galaxy Formation with Stellar Halos I: Methods
• Stellar Tidal Streams in Spiral Galaxies of the Local Volume: A Pilot Survey with Modest Aperture Telescopes
• Accreted versus In Situ Milky Way Globular Clusters
• The AIMSS Project I: Bridging the Star Cluster - Galaxy Divide
• Witnessing galaxy preprocessing in the local Universe: the case of a star-bursting group falling into Abell 1367
• The ghost of a dwarf galaxy: fossils of the hierarchical formation of the nearby spiral galaxy NGC 5907
• On the Efficiency of the Tidal Stirring Mechanism for the Origin of Dwarf Spheroidals: Dependence on the Orbital and Structural Parameters of the Progenitor Disky Dwarfs
• Cold Dark Matter Substructure and Galactic Disks II: Dynamical Effects of Hierarchical Satellite Accretion
• NIHAO XV: The environmental impact of the host galaxy on galactic satellite and field dwarf galaxies
• The Atlas-3D project - IX. The merger origin of a fast and a slow rotating Early-Type Galaxy revealed with deep optical imaging: first results
• Metal-Poor Globular Clusters and Galaxy Formation
• The AIMSS Project III: The Stellar Populations of Compact Stellar Systems
• The Globular Cluster System of the Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy
• Searching for diffuse light in the M96 Group
• The dependence of tidal stripping efficiency on the satellite and host galaxy morphology
• The Next Generation Virgo Cluster Survey. IV. NGC 4216: A Bombarded Spiral in the Virgo Cluster
• Threshing in Action - The tidal disruption of a dwarf galaxy by the Hydra I Cluster
• The AIMSS Project II: Dynamical-to-Stellar Mass Ratios Across the Star Cluster - Galaxy Divide
• Tidal streams in newly discovered M32 analogues: evidence for the stripping scenario
• Bimodal Galaxies and Bimodality in Globular Cluster Systems
• Thick-disk evolution induced by the growth of an embedded thin disk
• Stellar halos from The Dragonfly Edge-on Galaxies Survey
• Tidal Interaction as the origin of early-type dwarf galaxies in group environment
• Keck spectroscopy of globular clusters in the spiral galaxy NGC 2683
• New photometric and spectroscopic observations of the Seyfert galaxy Mrk 315
• VLT Observations of NGC 1097's "dog-leg" tidal stream
• Potential Black Hole Seeding of the Spiral Galaxy NGC 4424 via an Infalling Star Cluster
• A Potential Galaxy Threshing System in the Cosmos Field
• Globular clusters in the stellar stream surrounding the Milky Way analog NGC 5907
• Another look at the size of the low-surface brightness galaxy VCC 1661 in the Virgo Cluster
• Stellar tidal streams around nearby spiral galaxies with deep imaging from amateur telescopes
• Major mergers with small galaxies - the discovery of a Magellanic-type galaxy at z=0.12