Substructure in the stellar halos of the Aquarius simulations

Abstract

We characterize the substructure in the simulated stellar halos of Cooper etal. which were formed by the disruption of satellite galaxies within the cosmological N-body simulations of galactic halos of the Aquarius project. These stellar halos exhibit a wealth of tidal features: broad overdensities and very narrow faint streams akin to those observed around the Milky Way. The substructures are distributed anisotropically on the sky, a characteristic that should become apparent in the next generation of photometric surveys. The normalized RMS of the density of stars on the sky appears to be systematically larger for our halos compared with the value estimated for the Milky Way from main-sequence turnoff stars in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. We show that this is likely to be due in part to contamination by faint QSOs and redder main-sequence stars, and might suggest that 10% of the Milky Way halo stars have formed in situ. © 2011. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.