Stellar Streams and Clouds in the Galactic Halo

TL;DR

This paper reviews the discovery, detection techniques, and properties of stellar streams and clouds in the Galactic halo, highlighting their significance in understanding the Galaxy's formation and evolution.

Contribution

It compiles comprehensive data and sky maps of known stellar streams and clouds, summarizing detection methods and properties as of 2015.

Findings

Identification of numerous stellar streams and clouds in the Galactic halo.

Compilation of their positions, distances, velocities, and metallicities.

Discussion of properties and significance of individual tidal debris structures.

Abstract

Recent years have seen the discovery of an ever growing number of stellar debris streams and clouds. These structures are typically detected as extended and often curvilinear overdensities of metal-poor stars that stand out from the foreground disk population. The streams typically stretch tens of degrees or more across the sky, even encircling the Galaxy, and range in heliocentric distance from 3 to 100 kpc. This chapter summarizes the techniques used for finding such streams and provides tables giving positions, distances, velocities, and metallicities, where available, for all major streams and clouds that have been detected as of January 2015. Sky maps of the streams are also provided. Properties of individual tidal debris structures are discussed.