UCL Discovery
UCL home » Library Services » Electronic resources » UCL Discovery

Action and energy clustering of stellar streams in deforming Milky Way dark matter haloes

Brooks, Richard AN; Sanders, Jason L; Lilleengen, Sophia; Petersen, Michael S; Pontzen, Andrew; (2024) Action and energy clustering of stellar streams in deforming Milky Way dark matter haloes. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society , 532 (2) pp. 2657-2673. 10.1093/mnras/stae1565. Green open access

[thumbnail of stae1565.pdf]
Preview
Text
stae1565.pdf - Published Version

Download (2MB) | Preview

Abstract

We investigate the non-adiabatic effect of time-dependent deformations in the Milky Way (MW) halo potential on stellar streams. Specifically, we consider the MW’s response to the infall of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) and how this impacts our ability to recover the spherically averaged MW mass profile from observation using stream actions. Previously, action clustering methods have only been applied to static or adiabatic MW systems to constrain the properties of the host system. We use a time-evolving MW–LMC simulation described by basis function expansions. We find that for streams with realistic observational uncertainties on shorter orbital periods and without close encounters with the LMC, e.g. GD-1, the radial action distribution is sufficiently clustered to locally recover the spherical MW mass profile across the stream radial range within a 2σ confidence interval determined using a Fisher information approach. For streams with longer orbital periods and close encounters with the LMC, e.g. Orphan–Chenab (OC), the radial action distribution disperses as the MW halo has deformed non-adiabatically. Hence, for OC streams generated in potentials that include an MW halo with any deformations, action clustering methods will fail to recover the spherical mass profile within a 2σ uncertainty. Finally, we investigate whether the clustering of stream energies can provide similar constraints. Surprisingly, we find for OC-like streams, the recovered spherically averaged mass profiles demonstrate less sensitivity to the time-dependent deformations in the potential.

Type: Article
Title: Action and energy clustering of stellar streams in deforming Milky Way dark matter haloes
Open access status: An open access version is available from UCL Discovery
DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stae1565
Publisher version: https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stae1565
Language: English
Additional information: © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Royal Astronomical Society. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Keywords: Galaxy: evolution, Galaxy: halo, Galaxy: kinematics and dynamics, Galaxy: structure, Magellanic Clouds, dark matter
UCL classification: UCL
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Maths and Physical Sciences
UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Maths and Physical Sciences > Dept of Physics and Astronomy
URI: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10196405
Downloads since deposit
6Downloads
Download activity - last month
Download activity - last 12 months
Downloads by country - last 12 months

Archive Staff Only

View Item View Item