Statistical properties of substructures around Milky Way-sized haloes and their implications for the formation of stellar streams

Abstract

Stellar streams originating in disrupted dwarf galaxies and star clusters are observed around the Milky Way and nearby galaxies. Such substructures are the important tracers that record how the host haloes have accreted progenitor galaxies. Based on the cosmological context, we investigate the relationship between structural properties of substructures such as length and thinness at $z=0$, and orbits of their progenitors. We model stellar components of a large sample of substructures around Milky Way-sized haloes by combining semi-analytic models with a high-resolution cosmological $N$-body simulation. Using the Particle Tagging method, we embed stellar components in progenitor haloes and trace phase-space distributions of the substructures down to $z=0$. We find that the length and thinness of substructures vary smoothly as the redshift when the host haloes accrete their progenitors. For substructures observed like streams at $z=0$, a large part of the progenitors is accreted by their host haloes at redshift $0.5\lesssim z\lesssim 2.5$. Substructures with progenitors out of this accretion redshift range are entirely or less disrupted by $z=0$ and cannot be observed as streams. We also find that the distributions of length and thinness of substructures vary smoothly as pericenter and apocenter of the progenitors. Substructures observed like streams tend to have the specific range of $10\ {\rm kpc} \lesssim r_{\rm peri}\lesssim100\ {\rm kpc}$ and $50\ {\rm kpc} \lesssim r_{\rm apo}\lesssim300\ {\rm kpc}$.