I recently submitted my 3rd first-author paper, which is focused on the orbital dynamics and histories of satellite galaxies in the FIRE simulations. Here are a few takeaways from my paper, but there are MANY more takeaways in the paper here!
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I also recently gave a talk on some of my current research, and you can watch it here.
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The orbital velocity, specific angular momentum, and specific total energy strongly depend on the time of infall into the Milky Way-mass halo.
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In ~2/3 of satellites that completed more than one orbit around the MW-mass host, the minimum pericenter was not the most recent pericenter, suggesting that the orbits have grown at some point, and this is primarily due to either a rapid increase in their specific angular momenta near apocenter or more gradual increase over time, suggesting either perturbations at large distances or the slowly growing host potential are driving the orbit growth.
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The difference between the minimum and most recent pericenter distance is ~37% and the minimum pericenter occurred ~6 Gyr before the most recent.
