The reaction of a Galactic disc to sloshing dark matter halo

When a massive satellite merges within a larger host, it sinks through dynamical friction which not only leaves a wake of particles behind the satellite but also carries out large scale disturbances in the halo which can propagate all the way down to the disc causing warps to form (Weinberg 1998). This sloshing of the dark matter halo acts on larger timescales than direct tidal interactions with the main body of a satellite with the disc and its long-term effects on Galactic discs is not fully understood/known. In this project, you will investigate the effect of the dark matter halo wakes and tides from satellites on discs using a Basis Function Expansion code (EXP, Petersen et al. 2021) to re-simulate to much higher resolution the interaction of a Milky Way-like galaxy in the presence of Sagittarius from a self-consisten N-body run (Laporte et al. 2018) to study the response of the outer disc to a sloshing halo on an extended timescale and the type of fine-grained signatures this leaves imprinted on a disc and compare it with observations in the Milky Way (Laporte et al. 2021).