The origin of accreted stellar halo populations in the milky way using apogee, gaia, and the eagle simulations

Kinematics of halo stars. We show that ∼2/3 of nearby halo stars have high orbital eccentricities (e 0.8), and abundance patterns typical of massive Milky Way dwarf galaxy satellites today, characterized by relatively low [Fe/H], [Mg/Fe], [Al/Fe], and [Ni/Fe]. The trend followed by high-e stars in the [Mg/Fe]-[Fe/H] plane shows a change of slope at [Fe/H] ∼ -1.3, which is also typical of stellar populations from relatively massive dwarf galaxies. Low-e stars exhibit no such change of slope within the observed [Fe/H] range and show slightly higher abundances of Mg, Al, and Ni. Unlike their low-e counterparts, high-e stars show slightly retrograde motion, make higher vertical excursions, and reach larger apocentre radii. By comparing the position in [Mg/Fe]-[Fe/H] space of high-e stars with those of accreted galaxies from the EAGLE suite of cosmological simulations, we constrain the mass of the accreted satellite to be in the range 108.5≲ M ≲ 109M⊙ We show that the median orbital eccentricities of debris are largely unchanged since merger time, implying that this accretion event likely happened at z≲1.5. The exact nature of the low-e population is unclear, but we hypothesize that it is a combination of in situ star formation, high-|z| disc stars, lower mass accretion events, and contamination by the low-e tail of the high-e population. Finally, our results imply that the accretion history of the Milky Way was quite unusual.

Notas

Indexación Scopus

Palabras clave

Galaxy, Galaxy: abundances, Galaxy: formation, Galaxy: halo, Kinematics and dynamics, Stellar content

Citación

Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Volume 482, Issue 3, Pages 3426 - 3442 21 January 2019

DOI

10.1093/mnras/sty2955

URI

https://repositorio.unab.cl/xmlui/handle/ria/50409

Colecciones

FCE - Artículos de Revista

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