Reconstructing the Milky Way history with CFIS
The Canada-France-Imaging-Survey (CFIS) is a large program currently conducted on the Canada France Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) to map the Northern hemisphere that will cover 10,000 deg² for the u-band and 5,000 deg² for the r-band. Using the deep u-band of this survey in combination with other photometric bands from different surveys, we are able to identify different stellar populations of the Milky Way such as the Blue Horizontal Branch stars, the Blue Stragglers or the Main Sequence stars, and to trace their 3D profile. Comparing these distributions with cosmological simulations allows us to reconstruct the past merger history of the Milky Way.
Test of the ΛCDM model with stellar streams
Stellar streams as the perfect tracer of the Galactic potential at large distance, and so are the perfect objects to test alternatives gravity theories or exotic dark matter candidates. With N-body simulations, we saw that the asymmetry between the leading and trailing arms of the Palomar 5 stream are a natural consequence of the external field created by Milky Way on the progenitor in one of these alternatives theories, Modified NewtOnian Dynamics (MOND).
The stellar halo of M31 : Simulations VS Observations
Today, the favoured model for the formation of galaxies is the hierachical model. Indeed, the satellite galaxies that orbit around host galaxies are disrupted and grow the stellar halo. This work is focussing on the comparison of the Auriga simulations with the observations obtained by PandAS (Panoramical Andromeda Archeological Survey) by incorporating the observational biases into this simulations.
