Satellite Plane Alignments (MW/LMC)

The Milky Way’s brightest dwarf satellites are distributed in a remarkably thin, kinematically correlated plane roughly polar to the Galactic disk, with several dwarfs sharing similar orbital poles and spatial alignment, a configuration often called the “Vast Polar Structure” (VPOS) (Pawlowski et al. 2015; Bullock & Boylan-Kolchin 2017). In the standard ΛCDM framework, satellites are expected to populate a roughly triaxial, dispersion-supported dark matter halo with only mild anisotropy from filamentary infall, so long-lived, thin, rotation-like planes around a Milky Way–mass host—especially when also considering the perturbing presence of a massive companion like the Large Magellanic Cloud—appear rare in cosmological simulations and have been argued to be a small-scale challenge to ΛCDM (Pawlowski 2018; Guo et al. 2020).

#SatellitePlanes #VPOS #MWSatellites #M31 #CentaurusA #CoRotatingPlanes #AngularMomentumInheritance #SiblingPockets #SharedCascadeJ #P31 #P32 #P58 #P50 #SuccessiveCollisionTheory #SCT #NipokSCT #DRJMNIPOK #thenaturalstateofnature #cosmology #astrophysics