Schedule Oct 03, 2008
Building the Milky Way Halo with Aquarius
Andrew Cooper (Durham)

The \"Aquarius\" N-Body project carried out by the Virgo Consortium simulates six Milky Way-type dark matter haloes at the highest resolutions yet achieved in comparable N-body simulations (in one instance achieving 10^9 particles within r_vir at z=0, with ~1000 solar mass/particle). We build on these simulations by associating stellar populations with individual particles, using the GALFORM semi-analytic model, and following the tidal disruption of dwarf progenitor galaxies to recover a host of observables for the metal-poor haloes, streams and satellites of the Aquarius \"Milky Ways\", including spatial distributions, kinematics and age/metallicity profiles. This talk provides a brief overview of the Aquarius project and presents preliminary results from our model.

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