Recent advances from astronomical surveys have revealed spatial, chemical, and kinematical inhomogeneities in the inner region of the stellar halo of the Milky Way. In particular, large spectroscopic ...surveys, combined with Gaia astrometric data, have provided powerful tools for analyzing the detailed abundances and accurate kinematics for individual stars. Despite these noteworthy efforts, however, spectroscopic samples are typically limited by the numbers of stars considered; their analysis and interpretation are also hampered by the complex selection functions that are often employed. Here we present a powerful alternative approach-a synoptic view of the spatial, chemical, and kinematical distributions of stars in the Milky Way based on large photometric survey databases, enabled by a well-calibrated technique for obtaining individual stellar metal abundances from broadband photometry. We combine metallicities with accurate proper motions from the Gaia mission along the prime meridian of the Galaxy, and find that various stellar components are clearly separated from each other in the metallicity versus rotation-velocity space. The observed metallicity distribution of the inner-halo stars deviates from the traditional single-peaked distribution, and exhibits complex substructures comprising varying contributions from individual stellar populations, sometimes with striking double peaks at low metallicities. The substructures revealed from our less-biased, comprehensive maps demonstrate the clear advantages of this approach, which can be built upon by future multiband photometric surveys, and used as a blueprint for identifying the stars of greatest interest for upcoming spectroscopic studies.
We revisit the observed frequencies of carbon-enhanced metal-poor (CEMP) stars as a function of the metallicity in the Galaxy, using data from the literature with available high-resolution ...spectroscopy. Our analysis excludes stars exhibiting clear overabundances of neutron-capture elements and takes into account the expected depletion of surface carbon abundance that occurs due to CN processing on the upper red giant branch. This allows for the recovery of the initial carbon abundance of these stars, and thus for an accurate assessment of the frequencies of carbon-enhanced stars. The correction procedure we develop is based on stellar-evolution models and depends on the surface gravity, log g, of a given star. Our analysis indicates that for stars with Fe/H < or =, slant -2.0, 20% exhibit C/Fe > or =, slanted +0.7. This fraction increases to 43% for Fe/H < or =, slant -3.0 and 81% for Fe/H < or =, slant -4.0, which is higher than have been previously inferred without taking the carbon abundance correction into account. These CEMP star frequencies provide important inputs for Galactic and stellar chemical evolution models, as they constrain the evolution of carbon at early times and the possible formation channels for the CEMP-no stars. We also have developed a public online tool with which carbon corrections using our procedure can be easily obtained.
There are expected to be physical relationships between the globular clusters (GCs) and stellar substructures in the Milky Way, not all of which have yet been found. We search for such substructures ...from a combined halo sample of SDSS blue horizontal-branch and SDSS+LAMOST RR Lyrae stars, cross-matched with astrometric information from Gaia DR2. This is a sample of old stars which are also excellent tracers of structures, ideal for searching for ancient relics in the outer stellar halo. By applying the neural-network-based method StarGO to the full 4D dynamical space of our sample, we rediscover the Sagittarius Stream, and find the debris of the Gaia-Enceladus-Sausage and the Sequoia events in the outer halo, as well as their linkages with several GCs. Most importantly, we find a new, low-mass, debris stream associated with a pair of GCs (NGC 5024 and NGC 5053), which we dub LMS-1. This stream has a very polar orbit, and occupies a region between 10 to 20 kpc from the Galactic center. NGC 5024 (M53), the more massive of the associated GC pair, is very likely the nuclear star cluster of a now-disrupted dwarf galaxy progenitor, based on the results from N-body simulations.
Dynamical Relics of the Ancient Galactic Halo Yuan, Zhen; Myeong, G. C.; Beers, Timothy C. ...
Astrophysical journal/The Astrophysical journal,
03/2020, Volume:
891, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
We search for dynamical substructures in the LAMOST DR3 very metal-poor (VMP) star catalog. After cross-matching with Gaia DR2, there are ∼3300 VMP stars with available high-quality astrometric ...information that have halo-like kinematics. We apply a method based on the self-organizing map StarGO to find groups clustered in the 4D space of orbital energy and angular momentum. We identify 57 dynamically tagged groups (DTGs), which we label DTG-1 to DTG-57. Most of them belong to existing massive substructures in the nearby halo, such as the Gaia Sausage or Sequoia. The stream identified by Helmi et al. is recovered, but the two disjointed portions of the substructure appear to have distinct dynamical properties. The very retrograde substructure Rg5 found previously by Myeong et al. is also retrieved. We report six new DTGs with highly retrograde orbits, two with very prograde orbits, and 12 with polar orbits. By mapping other data sets (APOGEE halo stars, and catalogs of r-process-enhanced and carbon-enhanced metal-poor CEMP stars) onto the trained neuron map, we can associate stars with detailed chemical abundances with the DTGs and look for associations with chemically peculiar stars. The highly eccentric Gaia Sausage groups contain representatives of both debris from the satellite itself (which is -poor) and the Splashed Disk, sent up into eccentric halo orbits from the encounter (and which is -rich). The new prograde substructures also appear to be associated with the Splashed Disk. The DTGs belonging to the Gaia Sausage host two relatively metal-rich r-II stars and six CEMP stars in different subclasses, consistent with the idea that the Gaia Sausage progenitor is a massive dwarf galaxy. Rg5 is dynamically associated with two highly r-process-enhanced stars with Fe/H ∼ −3. This finding indicates that its progenitor might be an ultrafaint dwarf galaxy that has experienced r-process enrichment from neutron star mergers.
ABSTRACT The spatial structure of stellar populations with different chemical abundances in the Milky Way (MW) contains a wealth of information on Galactic evolution over cosmic time. We use data on ...14,699 red-clump stars from the APOGEE survey, covering , to determine the structure of mono-abundance populations (MAPs)-stars in narrow bins in and -accounting for the complex effects of the APOGEE selection function and the spatially variable dust obscuration. We determine that all MAPs with enhanced are centrally concentrated and are well-described as exponentials with a scale length of over the whole radial range of the disk. We discover that the surface-density profiles of low- MAPs are complex: they do not monotonically decrease outwards, but rather display a peak radius ranging from to at low . The extensive radial coverage of the data allows us to measure radial trends in the thickness of each MAP. While high- MAPs have constant scale heights, low- MAPs flare. We confirm, now with high-precision abundances, previous results that each MAP contains only a single vertical scale height and that low- , low- and high- , high- MAPs have intermediate ( ) scale heights that smoothly bridge the traditional thin- and thick-disk divide. That the high- , thick disk components do not flare is strong evidence against their thickness being caused by radial migration. The correspondence between the radial structure and chemical-enrichment age of stellar populations is clear confirmation of the inside-out growth of galactic disks. The details of these relations will constrain the variety of physical conditions under which stars form throughout the MW disk.
▪ Abstract We discuss the importance of very metal-poor stars to develop an understanding of the nature of the first stars that formed in the Universe and the nucleosynthesis events associated with ...them, as well as to refine models of galaxy formation, in particular for large spiral galaxies such as the Milky Way. After briefly reviewing the history of the search for very metal-deficient stars in the Galaxy, we summarize ongoing efforts, concentrating on the two large objective-prism surveys that have led to the discovery of the majority of stars with Fe/H < −2.0 known at present: the HK survey of Beers and collaborators and the Hamburg/ESO survey of Christlieb and collaborators. We then consider the wealth of information that can be gleaned from high-resolution spectroscopic study of very metal-poor stars. We close with a list of open questions and a discussion of new survey techniques that will expand the sample of recognized very metal-deficient stars in the Galaxy by several orders of magnitude.
Abstract
We analyze the observed spatial, chemical and dynamical distributions of local metal-poor stars, based on photometrically derived metallicity and distance estimates along with proper motions ...from the Gaia mission. Along the Galactic prime meridian, we identify stellar populations with distinct properties in the metallicity versus rotational velocity space, including Gaia Sausage/Enceladus (GSE), the metal-weak thick disk (MWTD), and the Splash (sometimes referred to as the “in situ” halo). We model the observed phase-space distributions using Gaussian mixtures and refine their positions and fractional contributions as a function of distances from the Galactic plane (
∣
Z
∣
) and the Galactic center (
R
GC
), providing a global perspective of the major stellar populations in the local halo. Within the sample volume (
∣
Z
∣
<
6
kpc
), stars associated with GSE exhibit a larger proportion of metal-poor stars at greater
R
GC
(
Δ
〈
Fe
/
H
〉
/
Δ
R
GC
=
−
0.05
±
0.02
dex
kpc
−
1
). This observed trend, along with a mild anticorrelation of the mean rotational velocity with metallicity (
Δ
〈
v
ϕ
〉
/
Δ
〈
Fe
/
H
〉
∼
−
10
km
s
−
1
dex
−
1
), implies that more metal-rich stars in the inner region of the GSE progenitor were gradually stripped away, while the prograde orbit of the merger at infall became radialized by dynamical friction. The metal-rich GSE stars are causally disconnected from the Splash structure, whose stars are mostly found on prograde orbits (≳94%) and exhibit a more centrally concentrated distribution than GSE. The MWTD exhibits a similar spatial distribution to the Splash, suggesting earlier dynamical heating of stars in the primordial disk of the Milky Way, possibly before the GSE merger.
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 define ...two dynamically distinct stellar populations: the diffuse inner and outer haloes, which comprise different stellar subpopulations with particular chemical and kinematic characteristics. Our simulated inner- and outer-halo stellar populations have received contributions from debris stars (formed in subgalactic systems while they were outside the virial radius of the main progenitor galaxies) and endo-debris stars (those formed in gas-rich subgalactic systems inside the dark matter haloes of the main progenitor galaxy). The inner haloes possess an additional contribution from disc-heated stars, in the range ∼3-30 per cent, with a mean of ∼20 per cent. Disc-heated stars might exhibit signatures of kinematical support, in particular among the youngest ones. Endo-debris plus disc-heated stars define the so-called in situ stellar populations. In both the inner- and outer-halo stellar populations, we detect contributions from stars with moderate to low α/Fe ratios, mainly associated with the endo-debris or disc-heated subpopulations. The observed abundance gradients in the inner-halo regions are influenced by both the level of chemical enrichment and the relative contributions from each stellar subpopulation. Steeper abundance gradients in the inner-halo regions are related to contributions from the disc-heated and endo-debris stars, which tend to be found at lower binding energies than debris stars. In the case of the outer-halo regions, although Fe/H gradients are relatively mild, the steeper profiles arise primarily due to contributions from stars formed in more massive satellites, which sink farther into the main halo system, and tend to have higher levels of chemical enrichment and lower energies. Our findings support the existence of (at least) two distinct diffuse stellar halo populations, as suggested by a number of recent observations in the Milky Way and M31. Our results also indicate that a comparison of the range of predicted kinematics, abundance gradients and frequency of α/Fe-deficient stars with observations of these quantities in the Milky Way, M31 and other large spirals can both provide clues to improve the modelling of baryonic physics, and reveal detailed information about their likely history of formation and evolution.
Abstract
The recent detection of a binary neutron star merger and the clear evidence of the decay of radioactive material observed in this event have, after 60 years of effort, provided an ...astrophysical site for the rapid neutron-capture (
r
-) process which is responsible for the production of the heaviest elements in our universe. However, observations of metal-poor stars with highly enhanced
r
-process elements have revealed abundance patterns suggesting that multiple sites may be involved. To address this issue, and to advance our understanding of the
r
-process, we have initiated an extensive search for bright (
V
< 13.5), very metal-poor (Fe/H < −2) stars in the Milky Way halo exhibiting strongly enhanced
r
-process signatures. This paper presents the first sample collected in the southern hemisphere using the echelle spectrograph on du Pont 2.5 m telescope at Las Campanas Observatory. We have observed and analyzed 107 stars with −3.13 < Fe/H < −0.79. Of those, 12 stars are strongly enhanced in heavy
r
-process elements (
r
-II), 42 stars show moderate enhancements of heavy
r
-process material (
r
-I), and 20 stars exhibit low abundances of the heavy
r
-process elements and higher abundances of the light
r
-process elements relative to the heavy ones (limited-
r
). This search is more successful at finding
r
-process-enhanced stars compared to previous searches, primarily due to a refined target selection procedure that focuses on red giants.
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