Extragalactic Stellar Tidal Streams: Observations meet Simulation

Understand

According to the well established hierarchical framework for galaxy evolution, galaxies grow through mergers with other galaxies and the LambdaCDM cosmological model predicts that the stellar halos of massive galaxies are rich in remnants from minor mergers.

• The Stellar Streams Legacy Survey (SSLS) has provided a first release of a catalogue with a statistically significant sample of stellar streams in the Local Universe, detected in deep images from DESI Legacy Surveys and the Dark Energy Survey (DES).
• The main objective is to compare the results of the observations of stellar tidal streams with predictions from state-of-the-art cosmological simulations regarding their abundance, up to a redshift z < 0.02, according to the LambdaCDM model.
• We use the predictions of the cosmological simulations Copernicus Complexio, TNG50 of the IllustrisTNG project, and Auriga to generate mock-images of nearby halos and search for stellar streams.