Substructure in the Galactic Halo

Abstract

Giant stars make particularly useful tracer stars for halo substructure because they are very bright and very common. I discuss several projects that use giant-star tracers to search the Galactic halo for tidal debris from known Galactic satellites, including that from the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy, and to search for tidal debris features from former, now destroyed satellites. Several cross-sections of the halo reveal it to be networked with extended, coherent substructures, indicating that it is likely to be predominantly made up of accreted satellites.