Detection of satellite remnants in the Galactic Halo with Gaia - II. A modified great circle cell method

We propose an extension of the great circle cell count streamer finding method of Johnston et al. that can be applied to the future Gaia data base. The original method looks for streamers along great circles in the sky, our extension adds the kinematical restriction that velocity vectors should also be constrained to lie along these great circles, as seen by a Galactocentric observer. We show how to use these combined criteria starting from heliocentric observables. We test it by using the mock Gaia catalogue of Brown et al., which includes a realistic Galactic background and observational errors, but with the addition of detailed star formation histories for the simulated satellites. We investigate its success rate as a function of initial satellite luminosity, star formation history and orbit. We find that the inclusion of the kinematical restriction vastly enhances the contrast between a streamer and the background, even in the presence of observational errors, provided we use only data with good astrometric quality (fractional errors of 30 per cent or better). The global nature of the method diminishes the erasing effect of phase mixing and permits the recovery of merger events of reasonable dynamical age. Satellites with a star formation history different to that of the Galactic background are also better isolated. We find that satellites in the range of 10⁸-10⁹ L_⊙ can be recovered even for events as old as ∼10 Gyr. Even satellites with 4-5 × 10⁷ L_⊙ can be recovered for certain combinations of dynamical ages and orbits.