Quantifying the impact of the Large Magellanic Cloud on the structure of the Milky Way's dark matter halo using Basis Function Expansions

Understand

Indications of disequilibrium throughout the Milky Way (MW) highlight the need for compact,flexible, non-parametric descriptions of phase--space distributions of galaxies.

• We present a new representation of the current Dark Matter (DM) distribution and potential derived from N-body simulations of the Milky Way and Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) system using Basis Function Expansions (BFEs).
• We incorporate methods to maximize the physical signal in the representation.
• As a result, the simulations of $10^8$ DM particles representing the MW--LMC system can be described by 354 coefficients.