Inferring the Andromeda Galaxy's mass from its giant southern stream with Bayesian simulation sampling

Fardal, Mark A.; Weinberg, Martin D.; Babul, Arif; Irwin, M. J.; Guhathakurta, Puragra; Gilbert, Karoline M.; Ferguson, Annette M. N.; Ibata, Rodrigo; Lewis, Geraint F.; Tanvir, N. R.; Huxor, Avon

doi:10.1093/mnras/stt1121

Cited by 135 publications

(220 citation statements)

References 97 publications

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“…Fardal et al 2013;Cautun et al 2014a,b;González, Kravtsov & Gnedin 2014;Piffl et al 2014;Veljanoski et al 2014, for a compilation of other measurements and discussions of systematic effects see Courteau et al 2014;Wang et al 2015). This results in 2849 MS-II haloes and in 63 COCO haloes in the required mass range.…”

Section: Data a N D S A M P L E S E L E C T I O Nmentioning

confidence: 93%

Planes of satellite galaxies: when exceptions are the rule

Cautun¹,

Bose²,

Frenk³

et al. 2015

Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc.

100

114

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The detection of planar structures within the satellite systems of both the Milky Way (MW) and Andromeda (M31) has been reported as being in stark contradiction to the predictions of the standard cosmological model (ΛCDM). Given the ambiguity in defining a planar configuration, it is unclear how to interpret the low incidence of the MW and M31 planes in ΛCDM. We investigate the prevalence of satellite planes around galactic mass haloes identified in high resolution cosmological simulations. We find that planar structures are very common, and that ∼10% of ΛCDM haloes have even more prominent planes than those present in the Local Group. While ubiquitous, the planes of satellite galaxies show a large diversity in their properties. This precludes using one or two systems as small scale probes of cosmology, since a large sample of satellite systems is needed to obtain a good measure of the object-to-object variation. This very diversity has been misinterpreted as a discrepancy between the satellite planes observed in the Local Group and ΛCDM predictions. In fact, ∼10% of ΛCDM galactic haloes have planes of satellites that are as infrequent as the MW and M31 planes. The look-elsewhere effect plays an important role in assessing the detection significance of satellite planes and accounting for it leads to overestimating the significance level by a factor of 30 and 100 for the MW and M31 systems, respectively.

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Section: Data a N D S A M P L E S E L E C T I O Nmentioning

confidence: 93%

Planes of satellite galaxies: when exceptions are the rule

Cautun¹,

Bose²,

Frenk³

et al. 2015

Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc.

100

114

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Fig. 5 shows the sky distribution of debris in a set of recent N-body models of the GSS's orbit within the M31 potential (Fardal et al, 2013). Each panel differs in the adopted values of M 200 , the M31 mass inside a sphere containing an average density 200 times the closure density of the universe, and F p , the orbital phase of the progenitor at the present day.…”

Section: The Giant Stellar Streammentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This further supports inferences from N-body modelling which suggest that the GSS progenitor was a fairly massive object with some degree of rotational support. Indeed, Fardal et al (2013) argue it was likely the fourth or fifth most massive Local Group galaxy as recently as 1 Gyr ago.…”

Section: The Giant Stellar Streammentioning

confidence: 99%

Substructure and Tidal Streams in the Andromeda Galaxy and its Satellites

Ferguson

Mackey

2016

Tidal Streams in the Local Group and Beyond

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Tidal streams from existing and destroyed satellite galaxies populate the outer regions of the Andromeda galaxy (M31). This inhomogeneous debris can be studied without many of the obstacles that plague Milky Way research. We review the history of tidal stream research in M31, and in its main satellite galaxies. We highlight the numerous tidal streams observed around M31, some of which reside at projected distances of up to ∼ 120 kpc from the center of this galaxy. Most notable is the Giant Stellar Stream, a signature of the most recent significant accretion event in the M31 system. This event involved an early-type progenitor of mass ∼ 10 9 M ⊙ that came within a few kpc of M31's center roughly a gigayear ago; almost all of the inner halo (R ≤ 50 kpc) debris in M31 can be tied either directly or indirectly to this event. We draw attention to the fact that most of M31's outer halo globular clusters lie preferentially on tidal streams and discuss the potential this offers to use these systems as probes of the accretion history. Tidal features observed around M33, M32, NGC 205 and NGC 147 are also reviewed. We conclude by discussing future prospects for this field.

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“…Of all the Aquarius holos, the Aq-A halo has a total mass most similar to M 31 (Fardal et al 2013), and so we use it as a reference point. It also has the largest total mass and is the most radially extended in nature.…”

Section: Galaxy Scaling and Placement Of Virtual Observersmentioning

confidence: 99%

The kinematics of globular clusters systems in the outer halos of the Aquarius simulations

Veljanoski

Helmi

2016

A&A

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Stellar halos and globular cluster (GC) systems contain valuable information regarding the assembly history of their host galaxies. Motivated by the detection of a significant rotation signal in the outer halo GC system of M 31, we investigate the likelihood of detecting such a rotation signal in projection, using cosmological simulations. To this end we select subsets of tagged particles in the halos of the Aquarius simulations to represent mock GC systems, and analyse their kinematics. We find that GC systems can exhibit a non-negligible rotation signal provided the associated stellar halo also has a net angular momentum. The ability to detect this rotation signal is highly dependent on the viewing perspective, and the probability of seeing a signal larger than that measured in M 31 ranges from 10% to 90% for the different halos in the Aquarius suite. High values are found from a perspective such that the projected angular momentum of the GC system is within 40 deg of the rotation axis determined via the projected positions and line-of-sight velocities of the GCs. Furthermore, the true 3D angular momentum of the outer stellar halo is relatively well aligned, within 35 deg, with that of the mock GC systems. We argue that the net angular momentum in the mock GC systems arises naturally when the majority of the material is accreted from a preferred direction, namely along the dominant dark matter filament of the large-scale structure that the halos are embedded in. This, together with the favourable edge-on view of M 31's disk suggests that it is not a coincidence that a large rotation signal has been measured for its outer halo GC system.

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Inferring the Andromeda Galaxy's mass from its giant southern stream with Bayesian simulation sampling

Cited by 135 publications

References 97 publications

Planes of satellite galaxies: when exceptions are the rule

Planes of satellite galaxies: when exceptions are the rule

Substructure and Tidal Streams in the Andromeda Galaxy and its Satellites

The kinematics of globular clusters systems in the outer halos of the Aquarius simulations

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