The Sagittarius stream in Gaia eDR3 and the origin of the bifurcations

Understand

The Sagittarius dwarf spheroidal (Sgr) is a dissolving galaxy being tidally disrupted by the Milky Way (MW).

• Its stellar stream still poses serious modelling challenges, which hinders our ability to use it effectively as a probe of the MW gravitational potential.
• Our goal is to construct the best possible sample of stars with which we can advance our understanding of the Sgr-MW interaction, focusing on the characterisation of the bifurcations.
• We improve on previous methods based on the use of the wavelet transform to systematically search for the kinematic signature of the Sgr stream in the Gaia data.