SIMULATIONS OF THE MAGELLANIC STREAM IN A FIRST INFALL SCENARIO

By G. Besla, N. Kallivayalil, L. Hernquist, R. P. van der Marel, Thomas J. Cox, D. Keres̆. 2010

168 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Recent high-precision proper motions from the Hubble Space Telescope suggest that the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds (LMC and SMC, respectively) are either on their first passage or on an eccentric long period (>6 Gyr) orbit about the Milky Way (MW). This differs markedly from the canonical picture in which the Clouds travel on a quasi-periodic orbit about the MW (period of ∼2 Gyr). Without a short-period orbit about the MW, the origin of the Magellanic Stream, a young (1–2 Gyr old) coherent stream of H i gas that trails the Clouds ∼150° across the sky, can no longer be attributed to stripping by MW tides and/or ram pressure stripping by MW halo gas. We propose an alternative formation mechanism in which material is removed by LMC tides acting on the SMC before the system is accreted by the MW. We demonstrate the feasibility and generality of this scenario using an N-body/smoothed particle hydrodynamics simulation with cosmologically motivated initial conditions constrained by the observations. Under these conditions, we demonstrate that it is possible to explain the origin of the Magellanic Stream in a first infall scenario. This picture is generically applicable to any gas-rich dwarf galaxy pair infalling toward a massive host or interacting in isolation.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/114ddbc8777f28cf86ae0224dcaf74c5581f663b

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Citations in the corpus

Hunting for the Dark Matter Wake Induced by the Large Magellanic Cloud (2019, background): “…massive LMC halo models (1011M ) have also been shown to reproduce several observations, such as the global properties of the Magellanic System (Besla et al. 2010, 2012, 2013; Salem et al. 2015; Pardy et al. 2018), the morphology of the MW’s HI disk and its resulting line of nodes (Weinberg &…”
Self-regulated star formation in galaxies via momentum input from massive stars (2011, methodology): “This model is initialized to be similar to the inferred properties of the SMC (before entering the MW halo, at least; see Besla et al. 2010, and references therein), a typical low-mass, gasrich dwarf.”
THIRD-EPOCH MAGELLANIC CLOUD PROPER MOTIONS. I. HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE/WFC3 DATA AND ORBIT IMPLICATIONS (2013, methodology): “…of the large scale gaseous structures of the Magellanic System (Stream, Bridge and Leading Arm) and the internal structure and kinematics of the Clouds are a result of interactions between the LMC and SMC in a first infall scenario, rather than interactions with the MW (Besla et al. 2010, 2012).”
Moving mesh cosmology: tracing cosmological gas accretion (2013, background): “The importance in separating different gas origins in the simulations can be seen by reference to observations of our local environment, in which the Magellanic Stream is a large reservoir of cold, neutral gas thought to arise from the tidal interaction of dwarf satellites (Besla et al. 2010, 2012).”
Gaseous Galaxy Halos (2012, background): “The clear exceptions to these distances are the Magellanic Stream and Leading Arm, which are at ∼ 55 kpc near the Magellanic Clouds and may extend to 100- 150 kpc at the tip of the Stream (e.g., Besla et al., 2010).”
BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD: DISCOVERY OF NINE ULTRA FAINT SATELLITES IN THE VICINITY OF THE MAGELLANIC CLOUDS (2015, background): “Modern simulations indicate that the LMC and SMC have recently come close enough to do spectacular damage to themselves (e.g., Besla et al. 2010; Diaz & Bekki 2011) The large-scale gaseous structures of the Magellanic stream, the off-centered bar of the LMC and the irregular geometry of the SMC are…”
Dwarf galaxy planes: the discovery of symmetric structures in the Local Group (2013, background): “This lead Besla et al. (2010, 2012) to suggest that the MS might have been formed by the tidal interaction of LMC and SMC before they were accreted onto the MW.”
The Bar and Spiral Structure Legacy (BeSSeL) Survey: Mapping the Milky Way with VLBI Astrometry† (2011, background): “This includes the interpretation of the proper motions of the Magellanic Clouds (Besla et al. 2010; Diaz & Bekki 2011; Peebles 2010; Ružička et al. 2010; Shattow & Loeb 2009) and galaxies in the Andromeda subgroup (Brunthaler et al. 2005, 2007; van der Marel & Guhathakurta 2008), the motion of…”