Cecilia Mateu
Stellar streams are to dynamics as stellar clusters are to stellar evolution: relatively “simple” systems of stars with a common origin whose common properties can be used to rewind evolutionary or dynamical processes much harder to disentangle in the Galactic field. Stellar streams are formed as stars are stripped from a dwarf galaxy or globular cluster by the Milky Way’s tidal forces, creating a fossil record of accretion that is best preserved in the halo, where streams are long lived. Unearthing it is essential to reconstructing the Galaxy’s accretion history, and modeling its dynamics key to constrain the distribution of dark matter at the scales of the Galaxy and of its satellites. In this talk, I will discuss efforts to collate the information in the literature for the nearly one hundred stellar streams known in the Milky Way and use it to provide an ensemble view of the Galactic system of stellar streams’s properties, its current observational biases and results inspired by recent discoveries made possible by the Gaia mission.
