The tidal stripping of satellites

By Justin I. Read, M. Wilkinson, N. Evans, G. Gilmore, J. Kleyna. 2005

150 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present an improved analytic calculation for the tidal radius of satellites and test our results against N-body simulations. The tidal radius in general depends upon four factors: the potential of the host galaxy, the potential of the satellite, the orbit of the satellite and the orbit of the star within the satellite. We demonstrate that this last point is critical and suggest using three tidal radii to cover the range of orbits of stars within the satellite. In this way we show explicitly that prograde star orbits will be more easily stripped than radial orbits; while radial orbits are more easily stripped than retrograde ones. This result has previously been established by several authors numerically, but can now be understood analytically. For point mass, power-law (which includes the isothermal sphere), and a restricted class of split power-law potentials our solution is fully analytic. For more general potentials, we provide an equation which may be rapidly solved numerically. Over short times (≲1–2 Gyr ∼1 satellite orbit), we find excellent agreement between our analytic and numerical models. Over longer times, star orbits within the satellite are transformed by the tidal field of the host galaxy. In a Hubble time, this causes a convergence of the three limiting tidal radii towards the prograde stripping radius. Beyond the prograde stripping radius, the velocity dispersion will be tangentially anisotropic.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d7cb6c71d055a5c16e458fccc7b46b2ffc083414

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Citations in the corpus

Formation and Evolution of Galaxy Dark Matter Halos and Their Substructure (2007, background): “Density profiles during tidal mass loss The evolution of the mass distribution in satellite halos undergoing tidal stripping is often studied within an external fixed potential (e.g. Dekel et al. 2003; Hayashi et al. 2003; Kazantzidis et al. 2004; Read et al. 2006).”
Disruption of Dark Matter Substructure: Fact or Fiction? (2017, background): “Secondly, variance in the orbital motion of the particles within the subhalo gives rise to scatter in the coriolis forces on these particles, which in turn introduces some ‘thickness’ to the shell of particles for which Ür = 0 (see Read et al. 2006, for a detailed discussion).”
Young Massive Star Clusters (2010, background): “Stars within this surface may be regarded as cluster members (Read et al. 2006).”
Galaxy formation theory (2010, background): “Attempts to account for this find that particles in an orbiting satellite that are on prograde orbits are more easily stripped than those on radial orbits which are in turnmore easily stripped than those on retrograde orbits (Read et al. 2006).”
Velocity Dispersion Profiles of Seven Dwarf Spheroidal Galaxies (2007, background): “This radius is convenient for practical reasons in our analysis as it covers the largest region common to all the data sets and is sufficiently small that one expects tidal effects inside this radius to be negligible (Read et al. 2006).”
DWARF GALAXY ANNIHILATION AND DECAY EMISSION PROFILES FOR DARK MATTER EXPERIMENTS (2014, background): “…internal and external potentials (i.e., those of the dwarf and Milky Way, respectively), the orbit of the dwarf, and on the orbital configuration within the dwarf (orbits that are prograde with respect to the dwarf’s orbit are more easily stripped than those that are retrograde; Read et al. 2006).”
A UNIVERSAL MASS PROFILE FOR DWARF SPHEROIDAL GALAXIES? (2009, methodology): “More recent N-body simulations (e.g., Read et al. 2006; Muñoz et al. 2008; Peñarrubia et al. 2008b; Klimentowski et al. 2008) monitor the evolution of both stellar and dark matter components over several pericentric passages and a wide range of orbits.”
Thin, thick and dark discs in ΛCDM (2008, methodology): “Toomre & Toomre (1972) attribute the phenomenon to increased resonance in the prograde case, but one can also think of it in terms of increased tidal forces for the prograde interaction (see e.g. Read et al. 2006b).”
Dependence of galaxy quenching on halo mass and distance from its centre (2012, background): “Tidal stripping (Read et al. 2006) and harassment (Moore et al. 1996, 1998) are two more quenching mechanisms unique to satellites.”
A BARYONIC SOLUTION TO THE MISSING SATELLITES PROBLEM (2012, background): “However, tidal stripping in a cuspy halo by itself does not reduce the central densities of the most massive subhalos enough to bring them into agreement with the observed kinematics of the MW satellites (Read et al. 2006a; Boylan-Kolchin et al. 2012).”
THE SAGITTARIUS DWARF GALAXY: A MODEL FOR EVOLUTION IN A TRIAXIAL MILKY WAY HALO (2010, background): “…nature of the stripping, and the dependence of the effectiveness of tidal stripping on the orientation of individual stellar orbits (see, e.g., Read et al. 2006a) means that on any given pericentric passage Galactic tides reach deeply into the satellite and can unbind stars from a variety of…”
A METHOD FOR MEASURING (SLOPES OF) THE MASS PROFILES OF DWARF SPHEROIDAL GALAXIES (2011, background): “…component during a close pericentricpassage and/or by stripping stars that, thence unbound, linger 16 sufficiently near the dSph to be observed and counted as bound members (e.g., Piatek & Pryor 1995; Oh et al. 1995; Read et al. 2006; Klimentowski et al. 2007; Peñarrubia et al. 2008b, 2009).”
Dark matter cores all the way down (2015, methodology): “This can be avoided if there is a central constant density core that causes dynamical friction to stall (Goerdt et al. 2006; Read et al. 2006a).”
Not so lumpy after all: modelling the depletion of dark matter subhaloes by Milky Way-like galaxies (2017, background): “As Brooks & Zolotov (2014) showed, the increased tidal forces from the central galaxy also can reduce the central masses of such dwarf galaxies even further, potentially eliminating the disagreement between theory and observations entirely (also see Read et al. 2006a,b).”
BARYONS MATTER: WHY LUMINOUS SATELLITE GALAXIES HAVE REDUCED CENTRAL MASSES (2012, background): “The tidal effects of a disk are expected to be increasingly stronger as the central density profile of satellites becomes shallower (Taylor & Babul 2001; Stoehr et al. 2002; Hayashi et al. 2003; Read et al. 2006a; Peñarrubia et al. 2010).”
Dark matter heats up in dwarf galaxies (2018, background): “Secondly, tidal shocking and stripping can lower the central DM density of the dwarfs, inducing scatter in ρDM(150 pc) at a fixed M∗ (e.g. Hayashi et al. 2003; Kazantzidis et al. 2004; Read et al. 2006a).”