The stellar halo of the Milky Way is populated by mostly old and metal-poor stars. As dynamical timescales are of order ~Gyrs at these large distances, accreted stellar substructures, such as dwarf galaxies or globular clusters, survive here as coherent entities longer than anywhere else in the Galaxy. These substructures represent our “fossil record” which can be used to reconstruct the Galaxy’s complex past. In this work, we seek to identify the structures found in the far reaches of the stellar halo as a step towards a correct interpretation of this fossil record. The advent of all-sky surveys in the Gaia era has ignited a prosperous period for this field of Galactic archaeology, but exploring the distant Milky Way (>10 kpc) with Gaia is difficult. Parallax measurements are much less accurate beyond the Solar neighborhood, though Gaia’s proper motions remain useful out to large radii. To push Gaia into the distant Galaxy, we combined these astrometric data with u-band photometry from the Canada-France Imaging Survey (CFIS). We exploited CFIS’ excellent photometric quality and depth (which extends 3 magnitudes deeper than that of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey) to use blue horizontal branch stars (BHBs) as a tracer population with well-measured distances. We first examined the distribution of BHBs using the OPTICS (Ordering Points To Identify the Clustering Structure) clustering algorithm to visualize the hierarchical nature of outer halo substructure. We then identified several well-known satellites, including a group of stars in the vicinity of a distant globular cluster (NGC 5466). Analysis of their kinematics suggested a few of these BHBs outside the cluster’s tidal radius were co-moving with NGC 5466, implying they may be tidal debris from this system. Interestingly, a stream had previously been detected extending from this globular cluster. However, its properties had not been studied in the decade since its discovery, and previous dynamical models were unable to reproduce many of the reported features. As one of the (allegedly) longest globular cluster streams on the sky - and given its distance and utility to constrain the Milky Way’s mass at large Galactic radius - we sought to explore this structure further. We subsequently used red giant branch stars (RGBs) identified in CFIS to try to better quantify the characteristics of the putative stream. We were able to filter these data and obtain a sample of stars that are fully consistent with stream membership and which span approximately 31 degrees of sky. Combined with the BHBs, we used these populations to trace the path of the stream, its distance and distance gradient across the stream’s longitude, and additionally estimated a lower limit to the stream’s luminosity. Our measurements suggest that the stream is at least 11% of the luminosity of the cluster. We then compared our observational data to dynamical models, which showed generally good agreement with the observed stream. This success reflects the updated properties of data measured in this work, and the inclusion of new data (especially proper motions). Our model suggests that the pericenter and apocenter of NGC 5466's orbit are 6.4 and 43 kpc, respectively, resulting in a very eccentric orbit (ε = 0.74). We also find evidence that the cluster experienced a recent interaction (within the past ~100 Myrs) with the Galactic disk, suggesting that the primary source of mass loss in this system may be caused by disk-shocking. The NGC 5466 stellar stream also exhibits an interesting heliocentric gradient in the leading arm, which our simplistic spherical halo model does not fully reproduce. Dynamical experiments with various halo shapes fit to this stream will prove interesting for future work. For local cosmology in particular, long, thin, dynamically cold stellar streams are ideal systems for constraining properties of the Milky Way’s dark matter halo, and streams at large radius are especially useful for measuring the Galaxy's mass interior to the stream. In this respect, we anticipate that NGC 5466 will be exceptionally useful as a probe of the shape, mass, and dark substructure of the Milky Way's distant dark matter halo. / Graduate

Les courants stellaires de marée sont des structures en étoile immaculées qui jouent un rôle central dans la résolution des mystères de longue date de l'archéologie galactique. Étant donné que les flux sont de nature orbitale, ils possèdent intrinsèquement les caractéristiques de résolution de la distribution de masse sous-jacente de la galaxie et peuvent être utilisés pour sonder la forme du halo de matière noire. En plus de tester le scénario de «fusion hiérarchique» de la formation de galaxies, les brèches de ruisseau peuvent également fournir une preuve indirecte de l’existence de sous-halos de matière noire (ce qui, en principe, limite la nature de la particule de matière noire elle-même). Pour toutes ces raisons, l'analyse dynamique des flux stellaires de la Voie Lactée devient naturellement l'un des problèmes les plus intéressants. Cependant, le principal défi consiste à détecter ces structures. Au cours de la thèse, l’algorithme STREAMFINDER (un algorithme à la pointe de la technologie) a été conçu pour traiter systématiquement le jeu de données Gaia (le nouveau catalogue astrophysique de l’ESA contenant des solutions astrométriques sans précédent de plus de 1,6 milliard d’étoiles) pour la détection des flux stellaires de la Voie lactée. Cette lourde entreprise a permis de détecter 10 structures de flux de confiance, dont 5 étaient considérées comme de nouvelles découvertes. Cette récolte de structures a également facilité, pour la première fois, la création d’une carte structurale et cinématique panoramique des flux stellaires de la rivière Milky. Halo, poussant notre communauté encore plus loin dans l’histoire complexe de la formation de notre galaxie. Ce projet a été immédiatement suivi de l'analyse orbitale de l'un des flux détectés (à savoir GD-1) pour explorer les améliorations des modèles de potentiel gravitationnel de notre galaxie. Les contraintes imposées à la masse de la Voie lactée et à la forme de son halo de matière noire, obtenues simplement en utilisant ce seul flux, ont révélé la puissance potentielle que l'analyse d'un ensemble de flux permettrait de sonder la distribution globale de la masse galactique de notre galaxie. Ainsi, la thèse a ouvert la voie à de nouvelles découvertes des sous-structures stellaires, soulignant également les perspectives d'avenir dans ce domaine. / Tidal stellar streams are pristine star structures that play central role in addressing long standing mysteries of the Galactic archaeology. Since streams are orbital in nature, they inherently possess the characteristics of unravelling the underlying mass distribution of the galaxy, and can be used to probe the shape of the dark matter halo. Besides testing the ‘hierarchical merging’ scenario of galaxy formation, stream gaps can also provide indirect evidence for the existence of dark matter sub-halos (thereby, in principle, constraining the nature of the dark matter particle itself). Due to all these reasons, the dynamical analysis of stellar streams of the Milky Way Galaxy naturally becomes one of the interesting problems. However, the foremost challenge is to detect these structures. During the thesis, STREAMFINDER algorithm (a state of the art algorithm) was designed to systematically process the Gaia dataset (ESA’s novel astrophysical catalogue containing unprecedented astrometric solutions of over 1.6 billion stars) for the detection of the stellar streams of the Milky Way. This hefty endeavour led to the detection of 10 high confidence stream structures, of which 5 were reported as new discoveries.This harvest of structures also facilitated, for the first time, creation of a panoramic structural and kinematic map of the stellar streams of the Milky Way halo, taking our community a step further in unravelling the complex formation history of our Galaxy. This project was instantly followed by the orbital analysis of one of the detected streams (namely GD-1) to explore the improvements in the gravitational potential models of our Galaxy. The constraints on the Milky Way’s mass and that on the shape of its dark matter halo, that were obtained by simply employing this single stream, revealed the potential power the analysis of an ensemble of streams would hold in in probing the overall galactic mass distribtuion of our Galaxy. Thereby, the thesis paved way for new discoveries of the stellar substructures, also highlighting the future prospects in this field.