The evolution of streams in a time-dependent potential

Understand

We study the evolution of streams in a time-dependent spherical gravitational potential.

• Our goal is to establish what are the imprints of this time evolution on the properties of streams as well as their observability.
• To this end, we have performed a suite of numerical experiments for a host system that doubles its mass during the integration time and for a variety of initial conditions.
• In these experiments we found that the most striking imprint is a misalignment of 10 degrees in the angular location of the apocentres of the streams compared to the static case (and to the orbit of the centre of mass), which only becomes apparent for sufficiently long streams.