The Spur and the Gap in GD-1: Dynamical evidence for a dark substructure
  in the Milky Way halo
  We present a model for the interaction of the GD-1 stellar stream with a
massive perturber that naturally explains many of the observed stream features,
including a gap and an off-stream spur of stars. The model involves an impulse
by a fast encounter, after which the stream grows a loop of stars at different
orbital energies. At specific viewing angles, this loop appears offset from the
stream track. A quantitative comparison of the spur and gap features prefers
models where the perturber is in the mass range of $10^6\,\rm M_\odot$ to
$10^8\,\rm M_\odot$. Orbit integrations back in time show that the stream
encounter could not have been caused by any known globular cluster or dwarf
galaxy with a determined orbit, and mass, size and impact-parameter arguments
show that it could not have been caused by a molecular cloud in the Milky Way
disk. The most plausible explanation for the gap-and-spur structure is an
encounter with a dark-matter substructure, like those predicted to populate
galactic halos in LCDM cosmology. However, the expected densities of LCDM
subhalos in this mass range and in this part of the Milky Way are $2-3\,\sigma$
lower than the inferred density of the GD-1 perturber. This observation opens
up the possibility that detailed observations of streams could measure the mass
spectrum of dark-matter substructures and even identify individual
substructures and their orbits in the Galactic halo.
