Journal
MONTHLY NOTICES OF THE ROYAL ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY
Volume 461, Issue 2, Pages 1590-1604Publisher
OXFORD UNIV PRESS
DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stw1400
Keywords
galaxies: haloes; galaxies: structure; dark matter
Categories
Funding
- European Research Council under the European Union [308024]
- Alfred P. Sloan Foundation
- National Science Foundation
- U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science
- University of Arizona
- Brazilian Participation Group
- Brookhaven National Laboratory
- Carnegie Mellon University
- University of Florida
- French Participation Group
- German Participation Group
- Harvard University
- Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias
- Michigan State/Notre Dame/JINA Participation Group
- Johns Hopkins University
- Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
- Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics
- Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics
- New Mexico State University
- New York University
- Ohio State University
- Pennsylvania State University
- University of Portsmouth
- Princeton University
- Spanish Participation Group
- University of Tokyo
- University of Utah
- Vanderbilt University
- University of Virginia
- University of Washington
- Yale University
- STFC [ST/K000985/1] Funding Source: UKRI
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In aspherical potentials orbital planes continuously evolve. The gravitational torques impel the angular momentum vector to precess, that is to slowly stray around the symmetry axis, and nutate, i.e. swing up and down periodically in the perpendicular direction. This familiar orbital pole motion - if detected and measured - can reveal the shape of the underlying gravitational potential, the quantity only crudely gauged in the Galaxy so far. Here we demonstrate that the debris poles of stellar tidal streams show a very similar straying and swinging behaviour, and give analytic expressions to link the amplitude and the frequency of the pole evolution to the flattening of the dark matter distribution. While these results are derived for near-circular orbits, we show they are also valid for eccentric orbits. Most importantly, we explain how the differential orbital plane precession leads to the broadening of the stream and show that streams on polar orbits ought to scatter faster. We provide expressions for the stream width evolution as a function of the axisymmetric potential flattening and the angle from the symmetry plane and prove that our models are in good agreement with streams produced in N-body simulations. Interestingly, the same intuition applies to streams whose progenitors are on short- or long-axis loops in a triaxial potential. Finally, we present a compilation of the Galactic cold stream data, and discuss how the simple picture developed here, along with stream modelling, can be used to constrain the symmetry axes and flattening of the Milky Way.
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