Ghostly Tributaries to the Milky Way: Charting the Halo's Stellar Streams with the Gaia DR2 catalogue

Understand

We present a panoramic map of the stellar streams of the Milky Way based upon astrometric and photometric measurements from the Gaia DR2 catalogue.

• In this first contribution, we concentrate on the halo at heliocentric distances beyond 5 kpc, and at Galactic latitudes $|b|>30\deg$, using the STREAMFINDER algorithm to detect structures along plausible orbits that are consistent with the Gaia proper motion measurements.
• We find a rich network of criss-crossing streams in the halo.
• Some of these structures were previously-known, several are new discoveries, but others are potentially artefacts of the Gaia scanning law and will require confirmation.