Related papers: The Rapid Formation of the Metal Poor Milky Way
We study the possibility that the Milky Way's cool stellar disc includes mergers with ancient stars. Galaxies are understood to form in a hierarchical manner, where smaller (proto-)galaxies merge into larger ones. Stars in galaxies, like…
The Milky Way dark matter halo is formed from the accretion of smaller subhalos. These sub-units also harbor stars---typically old and metal-poor---that are deposited in the Galactic inner regions by disruption events. In this Letter, we…
The variation of metal production over time and its dilution in the interstellar medium depend on the star formation and gas accretion rates. Measuring age-chemistry relations across the Milky Way disk provides key constraints on the gas…
Ancient, long-lived stars remain present in all components of our home galaxy, the Milky Way. Born a few hundred million after the Big Bang and during a time that marked the very beginning of the chemical evolution, these stars display very…
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…
We find that the relative contribution of satellite galaxies accreted at high redshift to the stellar population of the Milky Way's smooth halo increases with distance, becoming observable relative to the classical smooth halo about 15 kpc…
I discuss three different topics concerning the chemical evolution of the Milky Way (MW). 1) The metallicity distribution of the MW halo; it is shown that this distribution can be analytically derived in the framework of the hierarchical…
The age distribution, and chemical elemental abundances, of stars in the halo of the Milky Way provide constraints on theories of galaxy formation. As one specific example, the accretion of satellite galaxies similar to the present retinue…
The entire evolution of the Milky Way, including its mass-assembly and star-formation history, is imprinted onto the chemo-dynamical distribution function of its member stars, f(x, v, [X/H]), in the multi-dimensional phase space spanned by…
The Milky Way is a mosaic of stars from different origins. In particular, metal-poor accreted star candidates offer a unique opportunity to better understand the accretion history of the Milky Way. In this work, we aim to explore the…
This paper presents theoretical star formation and chemical enrichment histories for the stellar halo of the Milky Way based on new chemodynamical modeling. The goal of this study is to assess the extent to which metal-poor stars in the…
We present the results of a detailed abundance analysis of one of the confirmed building blocks of the Milky Way stellar halo, a kinematically-coherent metal-poor stellar stream. We have obtained high resolution and high S/N spectra of 12…
Metal-poor stars are key for studying the formation and evolution of the Galaxy. Evidence of the early mergers that built up the Galaxy remains in the distributions of abundances, kinematics, and orbital parameters of its stars. Several…
The four main findings about the age and abundance structure of the Milky Way bulge based on microlensed dwarf and subgiant stars are: (1) a wide metallicity distribution with distinct peaks at [Fe/H]=-1.09, -0.63, -0.20, +0.12, +0.41; (2)…
We develop a new method to account for the finite lifetimes of stars and trace individual abundances within a semi-analytic model of galaxy formation. At variance with previous methods, based on the storage of the (binned) past star…
The Pristine survey uses narrow-band photometry to derive precise metallicities down to the extremely metal-poor regime ([Fe/H] < -3), and currently consists of over 4 million FGK-type stars over a sky area of $\sim 2~500\, \mathrm{deg}^2$.…
We present a low metallicity map of the Milky Way consisting of $\sim$111,000 giants with $-3.5 \lesssim$ [Fe/H] $\lesssim -$0.75, based on public photometry from the second data release of the SkyMapper survey. These stars extend out to…
Milky Way halo substructures identified in dynamical space are known to suffer from contamination from the Milky Way in-situ stars, which makes their accreted origins uncertain. We present detailed chemical abundances of 35 stars belonging…
Evidence suggests that the Milky Way (MW) underwent a major collision with the Gaia-Sausage/Enceladus (GSE) dwarf galaxy around cosmic noon. While GSE has since been fully disrupted, it brought in ex situ stars and dynamically heated in…
In the hierarchical assembly framework, the accretion history of the Milky Way is crucial to understand its evolution. However, in massive mergers, integrals of motion are not strictly conserved, redistributing accreted stars across…