2019ApJ...880...38B

We present a model for the interaction of the GD-1 stellar stream with a massive perturber that naturally explains many of the observed stream features, including a gap and an off-stream spur of stars. The model involves an impulse by a fast encounter, after which the stream grows a loop of stars at different orbital energies. At specific viewing angles, this loop appears offset from the stream track. A quantitative comparison of the spur-and-gap features prefers models where the perturber is in the mass range of 10⁶-10⁸ M_☉. Orbit integrations back in time show that the stream encounter could not have been caused by any known globular cluster or dwarf galaxy with a determined orbit, and mass, size, and impact parameter arguments show that it could not have been caused by a molecular cloud in the Milky Way disk. The most plausible explanation for the gap-and-spur structure is an encounter with a dark matter substructure, like those predicted to populate galactic halos in ΛCDM cosmology. However, the expected densities of ΛCDM subhalos in this mass range and in this part of the Milky Way are 2σ-3σ lower than the inferred density of the GD-1 perturber. This observation opens up the possibility that detailed observations of streams could measure the mass spectrum of dark matter substructures and even identify individual substructures and their orbits in the Galactic halo.