Abstract
The observational data expected to come from the Gaia astrometric mission represent an unrivaled opportunity to search for tidal streams using all-sky full phase-space information for nearly a billion stars in our Galaxy. In this contribution we will describe the Modified Great Circle Cell Count (mGC3) method devised for the detection of stellar streams in the galactic halo. This method is based on the GC3 method originally devised by Johnston, Hernquist, & Bolte (1996), modified to include velocity information in order to enhance the contrast of stream signatures with respect to the galactic halo background. We present our results on the efficiency of mGC3, tested by embedding tidal streams from N-body simulations in a mock Gaia catalogue of the galactic background, which includes a realistic realization of the photometric and kinematic properties, errors and completeness limits. We investigate mGC3's efficiency as a function of initial satellite luminosity, star formation history and orbital parameters and find that satellites in the range 10^8-10^9 L_⊙ can be recovered for streams as dynamically old as ~10 Gyr and up to galactocentric distances of ~40 kpc. For some combinations of dynamical ages and orbits, tidal streams with luminosities down to 4-5×10^7 L_⊙ can be recovered.
