# Studying Evolution of the Galactic Potential and Halo Streamers with Future Astrometric Satellites

## 1 Introduction

Tidal streams in the Galactic halo are a natural prediction of hierarchical galaxy formation, where the Galaxy builds up its mass by accreting smaller satellite galaxies. They are often traced by luminous horizontal and giant branch stars outside the tidal radius of a satellite (such as the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy) or a globular cluster (cf. Grillmair et al. 1998, Irwin & Hatzidimitriou 1995) as a result of tidal stripping, shocking or evaporation. That extra-tidal material (stars or gas clouds) traces the orbit of the satellite or globular cluster has long been known to be a powerful probe of the potential of the Galaxy in the halo, and has been exploited extensively particularly in the case of the Magellanic Clouds and Magellanic Stream (Murai & Fujimoto 1980, Putman et al. 1999, this volume).

Among the future astrometric missions, SIM is a pointed observatory with the main science goal of finding nearby planets, while GAIA (under study) will continuously monitor the relative positions of about $`10^9`$ stars above $`20`$ mag. limit over the full sky over a period of $`45`$ years with additional information of radial velocity to better than $`310`$km/s accuracy (depending on spectral type) for stars brighter than $`16`$ mag. (cf. the compiled instrument specs in Table 1, and the original documents by Gilmore et al. 1998, Unwin et al. 1998). GAIA represents an improvement over the Hipparcos mission by a factor of about a thousand in precision, more than a million in the probing volume, and a factor of ten thousand in number of objects.

Helmi, Zhao & de Zeeuw (1999, this volume) show that streams can be identified by as peaks in the distribution in the angular momentum space, measurable with GAIA. Once identified, we can fit a stream with an orbit or more accurately a simulated stream in a given potential. Johnston, Zhao, Spergel & Hernquist (1999) show that a few percent precision in the rotation curve, flattening and triaxiality of the halo is reachable by mapping out the proper motions (with SIM accuracy) and radial velocities along a tidal stream $`\mathrm{\hspace{0.25em}20}`$ kpc from the Sun. In particular, they show that the fairly large error in distance measurements to outer halo stars presents no serious problem since one can predict distances theoretically using the known narrow distribution of the angular momentum or energy along the tails associated with a particular Galactic satellite. We expect these results should largely hold for streams detectable by GAIA. These numerical simulations are very encouraging since they show that it is plausible to a learn great deal about the Galactic potential with even a small sample of stream stars from GAIA. Some unaddressed issues include whether stream members will still be identifiable in angular momentum in potentials without axial symmetry, and the robustness of both methods if the Galactic potential evolves in time.

Here we illustrate how the properties of tidal streams evolve in time-dependent potentials and discuss whether members of such streams might still be identified using the 6D information from GAIA. We study the effect of contamination from field stars, evolution and non-axial symmetry of the potential, and the lack of very accurate radial velocity and parallax on our ability to detect streams. We concentrate on satellites which fall in and are disrupted recently (about 4 Gyrs ago, well after the violent relaxation phase) and maintain a cold spaghetti-like structure. We also put the satellites on relatively tight orbits but which lie outside the solar circle (pericenter of about 8 kpc and apocenter of about 40 kpc) such that the bright member stars in the stream are still within the reach of detectability of GAIA. Such streams typically go around the Galaxy less than 5 times since disruption, and are typically far from fully phase-mixed.

## 2 Strategy for GAIA: stars in a stream vs. field stars

We propose to select bright horizontal/giant branch (HB/GB) stars as tracers of tidal debris of a halo satellite (which we take to be either a dwarf galaxy or a globular cluster). A satellite with a typical luminosity $`L=10^{57}L_{}`$ has numerous HB and GB stars with $`M_V0.75`$mag, which are easily observable at 20 kpc from the Galactic center ($`m_V18`$mag or brighter) with GAIA. While the depth of the debris is typically difficult to resolve with GAIA parallax, GAIA proper motion (cf. Table 1) is good enough to resolve the internal dispersion of the debris, which is of the order $`\sigma /20\mathrm{k}\mathrm{p}\mathrm{c}100\mu `$as/yr, where $`\sigma 10\text{ km\hspace{0.17em}s}^1`$ is the typical velocity dispersion of a satellite.

A satellite with luminosity $`10^{57}L_{}`$ typically has

$$N_{obs}=\frac{fL}{500L_{}}100$$
(1)   
numbers of stars in its tidal tail, where we assume there is about one HB or GB star per $`500L_{}`$ and between $`f=0.5\%`$ to $`50\%`$ of the stars in the original satellite are liberated.

In comparison, the density of field HB or GB stars in the halo which happen to be in the same solid angle, and have the same proper motion and radial velocity

$$N_{field}=\mathrm{\Sigma }\mathrm{\Omega }\left(\frac{\sigma }{100\text{ km\hspace{0.17em}s}^1}\right)^31$$
(2)   
where $`100\text{ km\hspace{0.17em}s}^1`$ is the dispersion of field stars, $`\mathrm{\Sigma }(110)`$ is the typical number of field giants per square degree and $`\mathrm{\Omega }`$ is the solid angle of the tidal debris in degrees, which for the Sagittarius (Sgr) tidal stream is about $`5^o\times (20^o60^o)`$. In other words while there might be 25 stars in a solid angle of $`5^o\times 5^o`$ in a stream, only $`25\%`$ of the chance that there is one field star in the same piece of sky with proper motions and radial velocities indistinguishable from the stream stars. In fact Sgr was discovered on the basis of radial velocity and photometric parallax against a dense foreground of bulge stars (Ibata, Gilmore, & Irwin 1994). So as far as identifying stars in a cold stream with GAIA is concerned we conclude that contamination from field halo stars is likely not a serious problem.

It is worth commenting on the advantages of stars in a stream, as compared to stars in the field, in constraining the Galactic potential. Stars in a stream trace a narrow bunch of orbits in the vicinity of that of the center of the mass, and are correlated in orbital phase: they can all be traced back to a small volume (e.g., near pericenters of the satellite orbit) where they were once bound to the satellite. Hence we expect a tight constraint on parameters of the Galactic potential and the initial condition of the center of the mass of the satellite (about a dozen parameters in total) by fitting the individual proper motions of one hundred or more stars along a stream since the fitting problem is over-constrained. In contrast, field stars are random samples of the distribution function (DF) of the halo, and the large number of degrees of freedom in choosing the 6-dimensional DF makes the problem often under-constrained: one generally cannot make the assumption that the halo field stars are in steady state as an ensemble because it typically takes much longer than a Hubble time to phase-mix completely at radii of 30 kpc or more.

How well can we determine the Galactic potential with a stream? Assume each debris star has an intrinsic energy spread $`\mathrm{\Delta }EV_{cir}^2a/R`$ relative to the orbit of the center of the mass, where $`a=(0.11)`$ kpc is the size of the parent satellite at the time of disruption, also the thickness of a cross-section of the stream, and $`R=(840)`$ kpc is the radius of the pericenter, then the accuracy of the potential from fitting $`N_{obs}(1001000)`$ stars is

$$ϵ\frac{1}{\sqrt{N_{obs}}}\frac{\mathrm{\Delta }E}{V_{cir}^2}(0.11)\%$$
(3)   
The accuracy is not very sensitive to the luminosity of the disrupted satellite since both $`N_{obs}`$ and $`a`$ scale with the luminosity of the satellite. While this agrees fairly well with the study of parameterized static potentials (Johnston et al. 1999), it remains to be tested for more realistic models with evolution.

## 3 Science for GAIA: evolution of the Galactic potential

To study the effect of the evolution and flattening of the potential on a stream, we follow the disruption of satellites in a simple, flattened, singular isothermal potential $`\mathrm{\Phi }(r,\theta ,t)`$ which is time-dependent but maintains a rigorously flat rotation curve at all radii, where $`(r,\theta )`$ are the spherical coordinates describing the radius and the angle from the North Galactic Pole, $`t`$ is defined such that $`t=0`$ would be the present epoch. This is perhaps a sensible choice since we do not expect a major merger to have occurred within the past 4 Gyrs. We study three types of moderately evolving potential with identical flattening and rotation curves at the present epoch.

First we consider a Galactic potential

$$\mathrm{\Phi }_G(r,\theta ,t)=V_0^2\left[A_s\mathrm{log}r+\frac{ϵ}{2}\mathrm{cos}2\theta \right],$$
(4)   
where

$$A_s(t)=1ϵ_0+ϵ(t),ϵ(t)=ϵ_0\mathrm{cos}\frac{2\pi t}{T_G}.$$
(5)   
This model simulates the effect of the Galaxy becoming more massive and flattened in potential as it grows a disk. The time-evolution is such that the Galactic potential grows from prolate at time $`t=T_G/2`$ to spherical at time $`t=T_G/4`$, and then to oblate at $`t=0`$. A more general prescription of the temporal variation might include a full set of Fourier terms. We adopt parameters

$$V_0=200\text{ km\hspace{0.17em}s}^1,ϵ_0=0.1,$$
(6)   
such that the present-day rotation curve amplitude is $`200\text{ km\hspace{0.17em}s}^1`$, and equal potential axis ratio $`1ϵ_00.9`$. $`ϵ_0`$ needs to be small so as to guarantee that the volume density of the model is positive everywhere at all time. We set $`T_G/4=4`$Gyr, a reasonable time scale for the growth of the Galactic disk.

Second we consider a Galactic potential where the minor axis of the potential slowly flips over a time scale $`T_F`$,

$$\mathrm{\Phi }_F(r,\theta ,t)=V_0^2\left[\mathrm{log}r+\frac{ϵ_0}{2}\mathrm{cos}2(\theta \frac{\pi t}{T_F})\right].$$
(7)   
This potential might mimic the tidal harassment of Local Group galaxies. We set $`T_F=2`$Gyr for the time to flip $`180^o`$. This type of model has also been examined by Ostriker & Binney (1989).

For the last case we analyze a static Galactic potential plus a time-varying perturbation coming from a massive satellite on a circular orbit with a period $`T_P`$. The potential is

$$\mathrm{\Phi }_P(r,\theta ,t)=V_0^2\left[\mathrm{log}r+\frac{ϵ_0}{2}\mathrm{cos}2\theta \right]\frac{GM_P}{\sqrt{|𝐑𝐑_P(t)|^2+b_P^2}},$$
(8)   
where we use a Plummer model for the perturber’s potential with a scale length $`b_P`$ about half of the tidal radius, the total mass of the perturber $`M_P`$ is taken to be $`5\%`$ of the Galactic mass enclosed by its circular orbit of period $`T_P`$ and radius $`R_P=\frac{V_0T_P}{2\pi }`$. Generally, the orbital plane of the perturber is unrelated to that of the stream, but here they are taken to be the same plane with both moving in the same sense. The perturber is set on an exactly polar, circular orbit with a period $`T_P=2`$Gyr ($`R_P=64`$ kpc, $`M_P=3\times 10^{10}M_{}`$, $`2b_P=14`$ kpc) without considering effects such as dynamical friction and mass-loss. These parameters might be appropriate for a very massive perturber such as the progenitor of the Magellanic Clouds (Zhao 1998a,b), which could significantly “harass” all smaller satellites in the halo.

Fig.1 shows the orbit and morphology of the simulated stream in these three potentials. The orbit of the disrupted satellite is chosen so that the released stream stays in the polar $`xz`$ plane, which passes through the location of the Sun and the Galactic center; the $`xyz`$ coordinate is defined such that the Sun is at $`x=8`$ kpc and $`y=z=0`$.

We then simulate observations of mock data of 100 bright HB and GB stars convolved with GAIA accuracy. The particles in the disrupted satellite are initially distributed with an isotropic Gaussian density and velocity profile (as in Helmi & White 1999) with dispersions $`0.4`$ kpc and $`4\text{ km\hspace{0.17em}s}^1`$ respectively. These particles are released instantaneously at the pericenter $`8`$ kpc from the center $`4`$ Gyrs ago. These parameters might be most relevant for satellites such as the progenitor of the Sagittarius stream. The parallax and radial velocity from GAIA will not be very constraining for stream stars beyond 10 kpc ($`100\mu `$as in parallax) because of rapid growth of error bars with magnitude of the stars (Lindegren, private communications). Here we adopt a simple parameterization for the error of the sample stars. We consider only horizontal branch stars, for which the errors in parallax ($`\pi `$ in $`\mu `$as), proper motion ($`\mu `$ in $`\mu `$as yr<sup>-1</sup>) and heliocentric radial velocity ($`V_h`$ in $`\text{ km\hspace{0.17em}s}^1`$) are functions of the parallax. We find that this simple formula

$$\sigma _\pi =1.6\sigma _\mu =\sigma _{V_h}=f(\pi ),f(x)=5+50(50/x)^{1.5},$$
(9)   
approximates the GAIA specifications fairly well.

Nevertheless, Fig. 2 and Fig. 3 show that the distribution of the proper motions of the stream remains narrow (as shown by the proper motion vs. proper motion diagram and the position-proper motion diagram) after taking observational error into account. The narrow distribution allows stars in a stream to be selected out from random field stars, as we argue in the previous section.

Fig.4 shows the simulated streams in the energy and angular momentum space for various evolution histories of the Galactic potential. For example, in the model where the Galaxy slews, particles move along straight lines defined by the Jacobian integral $`E\frac{\pi }{T_F}J`$, where $`J`$ is the angular momentum in the direction around which the system slews. By and large the energy $`E`$ of particles across each stream is spread out only in a narrow range at each epoch in the three models; the same holds but to a lesser extent for the angular momentum vector $`𝐉`$. This implies that stars in the stream are largely coeval even in the presence of realistic, moderate evolution of the Galactic potential. The energy and angular momentum is also modulated with particle position in a sinusoidal way across the stream, an effect which in principle can be used to infer the evolution rate of the Galactic potential and the flattening of the potential.

One of the challenges of using streams to constrain the potential is that measurements of both parallax and radial velocity from GAIA are likely dominated by noise for the fainter ($`M_V20`$ mag), more distant ($`50`$ kpc) members of a halo stream (cf. Table 1). Fortunately, we can use the property of nearly constant angular momentum and energy across the stream to predict the missing information with an accuracy often comparable to or better than directly observable by GAIA. In essence we apply variations of the classical method of obtaining “secular parallaxes”. The simplest example is a polar stream, which has no net azimuthal angular momentum, $`J_z0`$, so parallaxes can be recovered (to about $`10\mu `$as accuracy) from the solar reflex motion of the stream in the longitude direction as shown by the linear regression $`\pi |\mu _l|/40`$ in the top right panel of Fig. 2. More generally we can use the property that the total angular momentum and an approximate energy are roughly constant, i.e.,

$$𝐉=𝐫\times 𝐕\mathrm{constant},E(200\text{ km\hspace{0.17em}s}^1)^2\mathrm{log}r+\frac{1}{2}𝐕^2\mathrm{constant}$$
(10)   
to predict both parallax and heliocentric velocity; here we simply pretend that the Galactic potential is spherical. Surprisingly, these very rough approximations often yield fairly accurate parallaxes ($`10\%`$) and heliocentric velocities ($`30\text{ km\hspace{0.17em}s}^1`$) as shown by the narrow bands in Fig. 2 and Fig. 3; predictions tend to be poorer for particles in the (anti-)center direction, because it is where the angular momentum $`𝐉`$ becomes insensitive to the heliocentric velocity. The predicted velocities and parallaxes are testable with direct observations at least for the nearby brighter members of a stream.

Most relevant to constraining the evolution of the Galaxy is that the differences in the position-proper motion diagram (Fig. 5), reflected by these different evolution scenarios, are at a level clearly resolvable with GAIA accuracy. We caution that the examples shown here are biased towards nicely-structured and extended streams. These happen quite often for models where the Galaxy simply slews, but not for models involving a growing disk or a massive perturber as we increase the amplitude of the perturbation. We have also run simulations with various parameters for the satellite orbit and initial size and the Galactic potential. The structure of a stream can become very noisy for highly eccentric orbits with a pericenter smaller than 8 kpc and/or for potentials where the temporal fluctuation of the rotation curve is greater than 10%. These noisy structures as a result of strong evolution can be challenging to detect. Nevertheless we conclude that tidal streams are excellent tracers of the Galactic potential as long as a stream maintains a cold spaghetti-like structure, in particular, the results of Johnston et al. (1999) and Helmi et al. (1999) for static Galactic potentials are likely to be largely generalizable to moderately time-evolving potentials. However, perhaps the most exciting implication of these preliminary results is that by mapping the proper motions along the debris with SIM or GAIA we could eventually set limits on the rate of evolution of the Galactic potential, and distinguish among scenarios of Galaxy formation.

HSZ thanks Amina Helmi and Tim de Zeeuw for many helpful comments on an earlier version.