Milky Way Halo Vibrations and Incommensurate Stream Velocities

Abstract

Collisionless dark matter galactic halos are expected to exhibit damped oscillations as a result of ongoing late time accretion. An n-body model of the cosmological assembly of a Milky Way-like halo is used to quantify the time dependence of its gravitational field. The simulation contains stellar streams whose incommensurate perpendicular velocities are found to have an approximately exponential distribution with a scale of 10-20\kms, depending on how the stars are selected, comparable to those reported for the Orphan stream. The fluctuations in the quadrupole moment of the dark matter halo are sufficient to largely explain the tangential velocities. If velocity measurements of a larger sample of Milky Way streams finds (or does not find) the expected distribution of transverse velocities it will lead to limits on the cross-section of self-interacting dark matter, in which kinetic viscosity can damp the oscillations more rapidly than the mixing processes of collisionless dark matter alone.