Modeling the gravitational potential of a cosmological dark matter halo with stellar streams

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that stellar streams in cosmological simulations can effectively constrain the gravitational potential of dark matter halos, supporting their use in analyzing Gaia data to understand our Galaxy's mass distribution.

Contribution

The paper shows that fitting static spherical and triaxial NFW potentials to simulated stellar streams can recover the host halo's mass profile accurately.

Findings

Streams can be modeled with static potentials reasonably well.

Best-fit parameters recover the host halo's mass profile.

Method is promising for analyzing Gaia's stellar streams.

Abstract

Stellar streams result from the tidal disruption of satellites and star clusters as they orbit a host galaxy, and can be very sensitive probes of the gravitational potential of the host system. We select and study narrow stellar streams formed in a Milky-Way-like dark matter halo of the Aquarius suite of cosmological simulations, to determine if these streams can be used to constrain the present day characteristic parameters of the halo's gravitational potential. We find that orbits integrated in static spherical and triaxial NFW potentials both reproduce the locations and kinematics of the various streams reasonably well. To quantify this further, we determine the best-fit potential parameters by maximizing the amount of clustering of the stream stars in the space of their actions. We show that using our set of Aquarius streams, we recover a mass profile that is consistent with the spherically-averaged dark matter profile of the host halo, although we ignored both triaxiality and time evolution in the fit. This gives us confidence that such methods can be applied to the many streams that will be discovered by the Gaia mission to determine the gravitational potential of our Galaxy.