Detection of a 63° Cold Stellar Stream in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey

By C. Grillmair, O. Dionatos. 2006

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We report on the detection in Sloan Digital Sky Survey data of a 63°-long tidal stream of stars, extending from Ursa Major to Cancer. The stream has no obvious association with the orbit of any known cluster or galaxy. The contrast of the detected stream is greatest when using a star count filter that is matched to the color-magnitude distribution of stars in M13, which suggests that the stars making up the stream are old and metal-poor. The visible portion of the stream is very narrow and about 8.5 kpc above the Galactic disk, suggesting that the progenitor is or was a globular cluster. While the surface density of the stream varies considerably along its length, its path on the sky is very smooth and uniform, showing no evidence of perturbations by large mass concentrations in the nearby halo. While definitive constraints cannot be established without radial velocity information, the stream's projected path and estimates of its distance suggest that we are observing the stream near the perigalacticon of its orbit.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3f14cfdbdac2f037e1eb0a32e118aae7d6f67663

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The Accretion Origin of the Milky Way’s Stellar Halo (2007, background): “REFERENCES Abadi, M. G., Navarro, J. F., & Steinmetz, M. 2006, MNRAS, 365, 747 Adelman-McCarthy, J. K., et al. 2007, submitted to ApJS Belokurov, V., et al. 2006a, ApJ, 642, L137 Belokurov, V., et al. 2007, ApJ, 658, 337 Belokurov, V., et al. 2007, ApJ, 657, L89 Bullock, J. S., Kratsov, A. V., & Wei”
SEGUE: A SPECTROSCOPIC SURVEY OF 240,000 STARS WITH g = 14–20 (2009, background): “The five streams are Sagittarius (Yanny et al. 2000), Monoceros (Newberg et al. 2002), Orphan (Belokurov et al. 2007b), Virgo (Vivas et al. 2001; Juric et al. 2008) and GD-1 (Grillmair & Dionatos 2006).”
The number and size of subhalo-induced gaps in stellar streams (2016, methodology): “Nonetheless, candidate gaps have been reported in Pal 5 (Odenkirchen et al. 2003) and GD-1 (Grillmair & Dionatos 2006b) streams using the SDSS photometry alone (see e.g. Carlberg, Grillmair & Hetherington 2012; Carlberg & Grillmair 2013).”
SAGITTARIUS II, DRACO II AND LAEVENS 3: THREE NEW MILKY WAY SATELLITES DISCOVERED IN THE PAN-STARRS 1 3π SURVEY (2015, background): “In addition, the SDSS enabled the discovery of several tidal streams (e.g. Belokurov et al. 2006; Grillmair & Dionatos 2006), further illustrating the central role of satellite and cluster disruption in building up the MW’s halo.”
THE MILKY WAY TOMOGRAPHY WITH SDSS. III. STELLAR KINEMATICS (2009, background): “◦2) is associated with the Grillmair & Dionatos (2006) stream.”
CONSTRAINING THE MILKY WAY POTENTIAL WITH A SIX-DIMENSIONAL PHASE-SPACE MAP OF THE GD-1 STELLAR STREAM (2009, methodology): “Clearly, the part of the stream at −10◦ < φ1 < 10 ◦ is further from the Sun, (as already noted by Grillmair & Dionatos 2006b; Willett et al. 2009).”
LAMOST Experiment for Galactic Understanding and Exploration (LEGUE) — The survey's science plan (2012, background): “For example, this allowed clear unambiguous discovery of faint long streams tracing around our Galaxy; e.g., the Grillmair and Dionatos 63-degree stream (Grillmair & Dionatos 2006), and the Orphan Stream (Grillmair 2006, Belokurov et al. 2006), among others.”
Luminosity function and radial distribution of Milky Way satellites in a ΛCDM Universe (2009, background): “…detect the presence of a significant dark population of subhaloes in the MW halo could come from the signatures of the interaction of such a population with the thin stellar streams in the MW halo ( e.g. Odenkirchen et al. 2001, Ibata et al. 2002, Johnston et al. 2002, Grillmair & Dionatos 2006).”
The Velocity Dispersion Profile of the Remote Dwarf Spheroidal Galaxy Leo I: A Tidal Hit and Run? (2007, background): “Given the complex and rich distribution of streams being discovered in wide-field surveys (Belokurov et al. 2006; Grillmair & Dionatos 2006), serendipitous kinematic detection of streams may not be surprising.”
THE SHAPE OF THE INNER MILKY WAY HALO FROM OBSERVATIONS OF THE PAL 5 AND GD–1 STELLAR STREAMS (2016, methodology): “Variants of particle-spray-type modeling, where the formation of the stream is simply modeled by orbit integration of a finite number of ejected stars, have been used to constrain the potential shape using the GD–1 (Grillmair & Dionatos 2006) and Pal 5 streams (Odenkirchen et al. 2001).”
CLUMPY STREAMS FROM CLUMPY HALOS: DETECTING MISSING SATELLITES WITH COLD STELLAR STRUCTURES (2010, methodology): “…in some cold stellar streams (e.g. the structure known as GD-1 and those from the globular cluster Pal 5, see Odenkirchen et al. 2003; Grillmair & Dionatos 2006a,b; Koposov et al. 2010), as well as the prospect of the density of these streams being mapped more extensively (and…”
The VPOS: a vast polar structure of satellite galaxies, globular clusters and streams around the Milky Way (2012, methodology): “The anchor points are the start- and endpoints of the stream as reported by Grillmair & Dionatos (2006a), as they cover the stream over a wider extent than Odenkirchen et al. (2001).”
Tracing Galaxy Formation with Stellar Halos. II. Relating Substructure in Phase and Abundance Space to Accretion Histories (2008, background): “…stream (see also Grillmair & Dionatos 2006; Grillmair 2006), which has tentatively been associated with the Ursa Major dwarf galaxy (Fellhauer et al. 2007), and there are several more such streams from globular clusters (Odenkirchen et al. 2003; Grillmair & Johnson 2006; Grillmair & Dionatos 2006).”
Precession of the Sagittarius stream (2013, background): “However, given the orbit of the GD-1 stream, the circular velocity measurement it facilitates, while independent and robust, is limited to the range of galactocentric distances accessible to other techniques (e.g. Bovy et al. 2012).”
FOUR NEW STELLAR DEBRIS STREAMS IN THE GALACTIC HALO (2008, methodology): “In addition to the large scale features attributed to past galaxy accretion events (Yanny et al. 2003; Majewski et al. 2003; Rocha-Pinto et al. 2004; Grillmair 2006a; Belokurov et al. 2006b; Grillmair 2006b; Belokurov et al. 2007), SDSS data has been used to detect the remarkably strong tidal tails ”
The total mass of the Large Magellanic Cloud from its perturbation on the Orphan stream (2018, background): “For example, both the GD-1 (Grillmair & Dionatos 2006) and the Palomar 5 streams (Odenkirchen et al. 2001) have proper motions closely aligned with their stream tracks (Koposov et al. 2010; Fritz & Kallivayalil 2015, respectively).”