This movie follows the tidal disruption of ten globular clusters in a simulated Milky Way-like galaxy for 8 billion years. The red particles show the dark matter of a simulated Milky Way-like galaxy and the green particles show ten disrupting globular clusters. The stars from the disrupting globular cluster form long stellar streams which roughly follow the orbit of the globular cluster. We can use these streams to measure the mass distribution and clumpiness of dark matter in the Milky Way, as well as the accretion history of our Galaxy. We have recently measured the properties of 12 such streams in Li et al. 2022 ([ Ссылка ]).
For reference, the bar at the top shows a length scale of 100 kpc (roughly 330,000 light-years). Time is shown by the scale factor which goes from a=0.5 (8 Gyr ago) to a=1 (the present).
