Action and energy clustering of stellar streams in deforming Milky Way dark matter haloes

Abstract

ABSTRACT We investigate the non-adiabatic effect of time-dependent deformations in the Milky Way (MW) halo potential on stellar streams. Specifically, we consider the MW’s response to the infall of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) and how this impacts our ability to recover the spherically averaged MW mass profile from observation using stream actions. Previously, action clustering methods have only been applied to static or adiabatic MW systems to constrain the properties of the host system. We use a time-evolving MW–LMC simulation described by basis function expansions. We find that for streams with realistic observational uncertainties on shorter orbital periods and without close encounters with the LMC, e.g. GD-1, the radial action distribution is sufficiently clustered to locally recover the spherical MW mass profile across the stream radial range within a $2\sigma$ confidence interval determined using a Fisher information approach. For streams with longer orbital periods and close encounters with the LMC, e.g. Orphan–Chenab (OC), the radial action distribution disperses as the MW halo has deformed non-adiabatically. Hence, for OC streams generated in potentials that include an MW halo with any deformations, action clustering methods will fail to recover the spherical mass profile within a $2\sigma$ uncertainty. Finally, we investigate whether the clustering of stream energies can provide similar constraints. Surprisingly, we find for OC-like streams, the recovered spherically averaged mass profiles demonstrate less sensitivity to the time-dependent deformations in the potential.