Tidal Stream Search in DESI Legacy Survey with Particle Spray
Stellar tidal streams — ribbons of stars stripped from globular clusters and dwarf galaxies by the Milky Way’s tidal field — encode the history of the Galaxy’s accretion events and the shape of its gravitational potential. This research uses the particle-spray (Mock Stream) algorithm to generate fast, N-body-free synthetic stream tracks and searches for their counterparts across the DESI Legacy Survey (DESI LS) footprint.
By forward-modeling stream morphology across a grid of progenitor orbits and matching mock tracks to stellar density maps built from DESI LS photometry, the pipeline recovers multiple tidal stream candidates over a wide area of sky.
Jun 24, 2026