Quantifying tidal stream disruption in a simulated Milky Way

Understand

Simulations of tidal streams show that close encounters with dark matter subhalos induce density gaps and distortions in on-sky path along the streams.

• Accordingly, observing disrupted streams in the Galactic halo would substantiate the hypothesis that dark matter substructure exists there, while in contrast, observing collimated streams with smoothly varying density profiles would place strong upper limits on the number density and mass spectrum of subhalos.
• Here, we examine several measures of stream "disruption" and their power to distinguish between halo potentials with and without substructure and with different global shapes.
• We create and evolve a population of 1280 streams on a range of orbits in the Via Lactea II simulation of a Milky Way-like halo, replete with a full mass range of {\Lambda}CDM subhalos, and compare it to two control stream populations evolved in smooth spherical and smooth triaxial potentials, respectively.