Stellar Streams in the Galactic Disk: Predicted Lifetimes and Their Utility in Measuring the Galactic Potential

Abstract

In this paper, we present a holistic view of the detection, characterization, and origin of stellar streams in the disk of a simulated Milky Way-like galaxy. The star-by-star simulation of the Galaxy evolves stars born in clusters in a realistic galactic potential that includes spiral arms, a bar, and giant molecular clouds over $5$ Gyr. We first devise a new hybrid method to detect stellar streams that combines phase space density information along with the action-angle space spanned by stars in our simulation. We find that streams' progenitor star clusters and associations are all preferentially higher-mass ($>1000$ $M_{\odot}$) and young ($< 1$ Gyr). Our stream-finding method predicts that we might be able to find anywhere from $1$ to $10$ streams with 6D \textit{Gaia} DR2 data in the solar neighborhood alone. The simulation suggests that streams are sensitive to the initial dynamical state of clusters, accumulated energy gain from encounters with giant molecular clouds (GMCs), and present-day actions. We investigate what we can learn about the Galactic potential by studying the feasiblity of rewinding stellar streams back to their origin. Even with perfect information about the non-axisymmetric components (spiral arms, bar) of the galactic potential, the stochastic GMC population makes backwards integration impossible beyond one or two disk orbital times. Streams are also sensitive to the properties of the bar, but fairly insensitive to the properties of the non-transient two-armed spiral in our simulation. Finally we predict that around $10$ to $30$ stellar streams should be detectable with \textit{Gaia}'s 10-year end-of-mission data. There are many more stellar streams waiting to be discovered in the Galactic disk, and they could hold clues about the history of the Galaxy for the past Gyr.