On the origin of the clumpy streams of Palomar 5

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that the clumpy stellar streams of Palomar 5 can be explained by epicyclic motion of stars, without requiring dark matter halo lumpiness, using N-body simulations and simplified models.

Contribution

It shows that stellar stream substructures can be formed by orbital dynamics alone, challenging previous assumptions about dark matter influence.

Findings

Reproduced observed stream substructures without dark matter lumpiness.

Overdensities are caused by epicyclic motion of stars along the tails.

Clumps can form several kiloparsecs from the cluster.

Abstract

In this paper we report a study (see Mastrobuono-Battisti et al., 2012) about the formation and characteristics of the tidal tails around Palomar 5 along its orbit in the Milky Way potential, by means of direct N-body simulations and simplified numerical models. Unlike previous findings, we are able to reproduce the substructures observed in the stellar streams of this cluster, without including any lumpiness in the dark matter halo. We show that overdensities similar to those observed in Palomar 5 can be reproduced by the epicyclic motion of stars along its tails, i.e. a simple local accumulation of orbits of stars that escaped from the cluster with very similar positions and velocities. This process is able to form stellar clumps at distances of several kiloparsecs from the cluster, so it is not a phenomenon confined to the inner part of Palomar 5's tails, as previously suggested.