Related papers: Blind source separation of the stellar halo
We introduce and apply a new approach to probe the response of galactic stellar haloes to the interplay between cosmological merger histories and galaxy formation physics. We perform dark matter-only, zoomed simulations of two Milky…
We study the stellar population history and chemical evolution of the Milky Way (MW) in a hierarchical LCDM model for structure formation. Using a Monte Carlo method based on the semi-analytical EPS formalism, we reconstruct the merger tree…
The chemical abundances of Milky Way's satellites reflect their star formation histories (SFHs), yet, due to the difficulty of determining the ages of old stars, the SFHs of most satellites are poorly measured. Ongoing and upcoming surveys…
Recent observational and theoretical work suggests that the formation of the Galactic stellar halo involved both dissipative processes and the accretion of subfragments. With present data, the fraction of the halo for which an accretion…
The Milky Way's stellar halo, which extends to $>100$ kpc, encodes the evolutionary history of our Galaxy. However, most studies of the halo to date have been limited to within a few kpc of the Sun. Here, we characterize differences between…
We analyze the global structure of the Milky Way (MW)'s stellar halo including its dominant subcomponent, Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus (GSE). The method to reconstruct the global distribution of this old stellar component is to employ the…
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…
We summarize evidence that the halo of the Milky Way comprises two different, and broadly overlapping, stellar components. The two structures exhibit different chemical compositions, spatial distributions, and kinematics. These results were…
We employ the first two years of data from the near-infrared, high-resolution SDSS-III/APOGEE spectroscopic survey to investigate the distribution of metallicity and alpha-element abundances of stars over a large part of the Milky Way disk.…
We present an analysis of the formation and chemical evolution of stellar haloes around (a) Milky Way Analogue (MWA) galaxies and (b) galaxy clusters in the L-Galaxies 2020 semi-analytic model of galaxy evolution. Observed stellar halo…
A crucial question in galaxy formation is what role new accretion has in star formation. Theoretical models have predicted a wide range of correlation strengths between halo accretion and galaxy star formation. Previously, we presented a…
The stellar halos of dwarf galaxies are becoming an object of interest in the extragalactic community due to their detection in some recent observations. Additionally, new cosmological simulations of very high resolution were performed,…
We report the results of an unsupervised decomposition of the local stellar halo in the chemo-dynamical space spanned by the abundance measurements from APOGEE DR17 and GALAH DR3. In our Gaussian Mixture Model, only four independent…
We investigate the formation of the stellar halos of four simulated disk galaxies using high resolution, cosmological SPH + N-Body simulations. These simulations include a self-consistent treatment of all the major physical processes…
We present an analysis of the radial age gradients for the stellar halos of five Milky Way mass-sized systems simulated as part of the Aquarius Project. The halos show a diversity of age trends, reflecting their different assembly…
We investigate the chemical and kinematic properties of the diffuse stellar haloes of six simulated Milky Way-like galaxies from the Aquarius Project. Binding energy criteria are adopted to defined two dynamically distinct stellar…
We study the stellar haloes of galaxies out to 70-100 kpc as a function of stellar mass and galaxy type by stacking aligned $r$ and $g$ band images from a sample of 45508 galaxies from SDSS DR9 in the redshift range $0.06\,\le\,z\,\le\,0.1$…
The dark matter halo of the Milky Way is predicted to contain a very large number of smaller subhalos. As a result of the dark matter annihilations taking place within such objects, the most nearby and massive subhalos could appear as…
While the Milky Way Nuclear star cluster has been studied extensively, how it formed is uncertain. Studies have shown it contains a solar and supersolar metallicity population that may have formed in-situ, along with a subsolar metallicity…
If the favored hierarchical cosmological model is correct, then the Milky Way system should have accreted and subsequently tidally destroyed ~100 low-mass galaxies in the past ~12 Gyr. We model this process using a hybrid semi-analytic plus…