Related papers: An old, metal-rich accreted stellar component in t…
Previous studies based on the analysis of Gaia DR2 data have revealed that accreted stars, possibly originating from a single progenitor satellite, are a significant component of the halo of our Galaxy, potentially constituting most of the…
The assembly process of our Galaxy can be retrieved using the motions and chemistry of individual stars. Chemo-dynamical studies of the nearby halo have long hinted at the presence of multiple components such as streams, clumps, duality and…
According to our current cosmological model, galaxies like the Milky Way are expected to experience many mergers over their lifetimes. The most massive of the merging galaxies will be dragged towards the disc-plane, depositing stars and…
The standard cosmological model ($\Lambda$-CDM) predicts that galaxies are built through hierarchical assembly on cosmological timescales$^{1,2}$. The Milky Way, like other disc galaxies, underwent violent mergers and accretion of small…
We have for the first time identified the early stellar disk in the Milky Way by using a combination of elemental abundances and kinematics. Using data from APOGEE DR17 and Gaia we select stars in the Mg-Mn-Al-Fe plane with elemental…
Knowledge of ages for stars formed over a galaxy's lifetime is fundamental to understand its formation and evolution. However, stellar ages are difficult to obtain since they cannot be measured from observations, being comparison with…
The advent of Gaia's 2nd data release in combination with large spectroscopic surveys are revolutionizing our understanding of the Galaxy. Thanks to these and the knowledge accumulated thus far, a more mature picture of the evolution of the…
The formation of our Milky Way can be parsed qualitatively into different phases that resulted in its structurally different stellar populations: the halo and the disk components. Revealing a quantitative overall picture of the Galactic…
The prevailing model of galaxy formation proposes that galaxies like the Milky Way are built through a series of mergers with smaller galaxies over time. However, the exact details of the Milky Way's assembly history remain uncertain. In…
Recent dynamical analysis based on Gaia data have revealed major accretion events in Milky Way's history. Nevertheless, our understanding of the primordial Galaxy is hindered because the bona fide identification of the most metal-poor and…
The majority of the Milky Way's stellar halo consists of debris from our Galaxy's last major merger, the Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus (GSE). In the past few years, stars from GSE have been kinematically and chemically studied in the inner $30$…
Stellar haloes form through the disruption of satellite galaxies over time, making them a promising observable for constraining galaxy merger histories. We use a dynamical decomposition technique to isolate the stellar haloes of Milky…
The Milky Way serves as a template for understanding the formation and evolution of late-type massive disk galaxies since we can obtain detailed chemical and kinematic information for large samples of individual stars. However, the early…
As galaxies form hierarchically, larger satellites may accrete alongside smaller companions in group infall events. This coordinated accretion is likely to have left signatures in the Milky Way's stellar halo at the present day. Our goal is…
Exploring the marks left by galactic accretion in the Milky Way helps us understand how our Galaxy was formed. However, finding and studying accreted stars and the galaxies they came from has been challenging. This study uses a simulation…
Reconstructing the mass assembly history of the Milky Way relies on obtaining detailed measurements of the properties of many stars in the Galaxy, especially in the stellar halo. One of the most constraining quantities is stellar age, as it…
The Milky Way is expected to host an accreted disc of stars and dark matter. This forms as massive >1:10 mergers are preferentially dragged towards the disc plane by dynamical friction and then tidally shredded. The accreted disc likely…
The role that minor mergers have played in the formation and structure of the Milky Way is still an open question, about which there is much debate. We use numerical simulations to explore the evolution of debris from a tidally disrupted…
Observations of the Milky Way's stellar halo find that it is predominantly comprised of a radially biased population of stars, dubbed the Gaia Sausage--Enceladus, or GSE. These stars are thought to be debris from dwarf galaxy accretion…
The Milky Way halo was predominantly formed by the merging of numerous progenitor galaxies. However, our knowledge of this process is still incomplete, especially in regard to the total number of mergers, their global dynamical properties…