Description
The ongoing merger of the Milky Way (MW) and the LMC provides a unique opportunity to study galaxy interactions and develop new methods of probing dark matter theories. Basis function expansions (BFEs) give a functional description of these evolving and deforming systems with the ability to robustly simulate the interactions and resulting deformations of multiple components. I will present a new suite of BFE N-body simulations that include halo and disc components for both galaxies and form a MW bar. I analyse these simulations with a multivariate Singular Spectrum Analysis (mSSA), a time series tool to extract dynamical processes. The BFE and mSSA tools are publicly available as the EXP code. These innovative techniques allow us new ways of studying highly dynamical features of the Milky Way and LMC.
