2008-12-16

extreme tidal disruption, moving groups

In the limit that everything in the stellar halo is the result of tidal disruption of a satellite, the phase space will contain lots of structure, but subject to important constraints, because tidal stripping mixes or stretches one (predictable) dimension more than the others. Bovy and I discussed this along with many other ideas for finding and using phase-space structure.

Bovy also made some plots of the observational properties of moving groups of stars in Hipparcos. He may have some phenomenology that rules out some hypotheses for the origin of this structure.

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