An official website of the United States government
Abstract Extended, old, and round stellar halos appear to be ubiquitous around high-mass dwarf galaxies (108.5<M⋆/M⊙< 109.6) in the observed universe. However, it is unlikely that these dwarfs have undergone a sufficient number of minor mergers to form stellar halos that are composed of predominantly accreted stars. Here, we demonstrate that FIRE-2 (Feedback in Realistic Environments) cosmological zoom-in simulations are capable of producing dwarf galaxies with realistic structures, including both a thick disk and round stellar halo. Crucially, these stellar halos are formed in situ, largely via the outward migration of disk stars. However, there also exists a large population of “nondisky” dwarfs in FIRE-2 that lack a well-defined disk/halo and do not resemble the observed dwarf population. These nondisky dwarfs tend to be either more gas-poor or to have burstier recent star formation histories than the disky dwarfs, suggesting that star formation feedback may be preventing disk formation. Both classes of dwarfs underscore the power of a galaxy’s intrinsic shape—which is a direct quantification of the distribution of the galaxy’s stellar content—to interrogate the feedback implementation in simulated galaxies.
more »
« less
Reading the CARDs: The Imprint of Accretion History in the Chemical Abundances of the Milky Way's Stellar Halo
Abstract In the era of large-scale spectroscopic surveys in the Local Group, we can explore using chemical abundances of halo stars to study the star formation and chemical enrichment histories of the dwarf galaxy progenitors of the Milky Way (MW) and M31 stellar halos. In this paper, we investigate using the chemical abundance ratio distributions (CARDs) of seven stellar halos from the Latte suite of FIRE-2 simulations. We attempt to infer galaxies’ assembly histories by modeling the CARDs of the stellar halos of the Latte galaxies as a linear combination oftemplateCARDs from disrupted dwarfs, with different stellar massesM⋆and quenching timest100. We present a method for constructing these templates using present-day dwarf galaxies. For four of the seven Latte halos studied in this work, we recover the mass spectrum of accreted dwarfs to a precision of <10%. For the fraction of mass accreted as a function oft100, we find the residuals of 20%–30% for five of the seven simulations. We discuss the failure modes of this method, which arise from the diversity of star formation and chemical enrichment histories that dwarf galaxies can take. These failure cases can be robustly identified by the high model residuals. Although the CARDs modeling method does not successfully infer the assembly histories in these cases, the CARDs of these disrupted dwarfs contain signatures of their unusual formation histories. Our results are promising for using CARDs to learn more about the histories of the progenitors of the MW and M31 stellar halos.
more »
« less
- PAR ID:
- 10486140
- Publisher / Repository:
- DOI PREFIX: 10.3847
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- The Astrophysical Journal
- Volume:
- 934
- Issue:
- 2
- ISSN:
- 0004-637X
- Format(s):
- Medium: X Size: Article No. 172
- Size(s):
- Article No. 172
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
Abstract From >1000 orbits of HST imaging, we present deep homogeneous resolved star color–magnitude diagrams that reach the oldest main-sequence turnoff and uniformly measured star formation histories (SFHs) of 36 dwarf galaxies (−6 ≥MV≥ −17) associated with the M31 halo, and for 10 additional fields in M31, M33, and the Giant Stellar Stream. From our SFHs, we find: (i) The median stellar age and quenching epoch of M31 satellites correlate with galaxy luminosity and galactocentric distance. Satellite luminosity and present-day distance from M31 predict the satellite quenching epoch to within 1.8 Gyr at all epochs. This tight relationship highlights the fundamental connection between satellite halo mass, environmental history, and star formation duration. (ii) There is no difference between the median SFH of galaxies on and off the great plane of Andromeda satellites. (iii) ~50% of our M31 satellites show prominent ancient star formation (>12 Gyr ago) followed by delayed quenching (8–10 Gyr ago), which is not commonly observed among the MW satellites. (iv) A comparison with TNG50 and FIRE-2 simulated satellite dwarfs around M31-like hosts shows that some of these trends (dependence of SFH on satellite luminosity) are reproduced in the simulations while others (dependence of SFH on galactocentric distance, presence of the delayed-quenching population) are weaker or absent. We provide all photometric catalogs and SFHs as High-Level Science Products on MAST.more » « less
-
Abstract The Milky Way has accreted many ultra-faint dwarf galaxies (UFDs), and stars from these galaxies can be found throughout our Galaxy today. Studying these stars provides insight into galaxy formation and early chemical enrichment, but identifying them is difficult. Clustering stellar dynamics in 4D phase space (E,Lz,Jr,Jz) is one method of identifying accreted structure that is currently being utilized in the search for accreted UFDs. We produce 32 simulated stellar halos using particle tagging with the Caterpillar simulation suite and thoroughly test the abilities of different clustering algorithms to recover tidally disrupted UFD remnants. We perform over 10,000 clustering runs, testing seven clustering algorithms, roughly twenty hyperparameter choices per algorithm, and six different types of data sets each with up to 32 simulated samples. Of the seven algorithms, HDBSCAN most consistently balances UFD recovery rates and cluster realness rates. We find that, even in highly idealized cases, the vast majority of clusters found by clustering algorithms do not correspond to real accreted UFD remnants and we can generally only recover 6% of UFDs remnants at best. These results focus exclusively on groups of stars from UFDs, which have weak dynamic signatures compared to the background of other stars. The recoverable UFD remnants are those that accreted recently,zaccretion≲ 0.5. Based on these results, we make recommendations to help guide the search for dynamically linked clusters of UFD stars in observational data. We find that real clusters generally have higher median energy andJr, providing a way to help identify real versus fake clusters. We also recommend incorporating chemical tagging as a way to improve clustering results.more » « less
-
ABSTRACT Surveys of the Milky Way (MW) and M31 enable detailed studies of stellar populations across ages and metallicities, with the goal of reconstructing formation histories across cosmic time. These surveys motivate key questions for galactic archaeology in a cosmological context: When did the main progenitor of an MW/M31-mass galaxy form, and what were the galactic building blocks that formed it? We investigate the formation times and progenitor galaxies of MW/M31-mass galaxies using the Feedback In Realistic Environments-2 cosmological simulations, including six isolated MW/M31-mass galaxies and six galaxies in Local Group (LG)-like pairs at z = 0. We examine main progenitor ‘formation’ based on two metrics: (1) transition from primarily ex-situ to in-situ stellar mass growth and (2) mass dominance compared to other progenitors. We find that the main progenitor of an MW/M31-mass galaxy emerged typically at z ∼ 3–4 ($$11.6\!\!-\!\!12.2\, \rm {Gyr}$$ ago), while stars in the bulge region (inner 2 kpc) at z = 0 formed primarily in a single main progenitor at z ≲ 5 ($${\lesssim} \!12.6\, \rm {Gyr}$$ ago). Compared with isolated hosts, the main progenitors of LG-like paired hosts emerged significantly earlier (Δz ∼ 2, $$\Delta t\!\sim \!1.6\, \rm {Gyr}$$), with ∼4× higher stellar mass at all z ≳ 4 ($${\gtrsim} \!12.2\, \rm {Gyr}$$ ago). This highlights the importance of environment in MW/M31-mass galaxy formation, especially at early times. On average, about 100 galaxies with $$\rm {\it{ M}}_\rm {star}\!\gtrsim \!10^5\, \rm {M}_\odot$$ went into building a typical MW/M31-mass system. Thus, surviving satellites represent a highly incomplete census (by ∼5×) of the progenitor population.more » « less
-
null (Ed.)ABSTRACT Recent progress in constraining the massive accretions (>1:10) experienced by the Milky Way (MW) and the Andromeda galaxy (M31) offers an opportunity to understand the dwarf galaxy population of the Local Group. Using zoom-in dark matter-only simulations of MW-mass haloes and concentrating on subhaloes that are thought to be capable of hosting dwarf galaxies, we demonstrate that the infall of a massive progenitor is accompanied with the accretion and destruction of a large number of subhaloes. Massive accreted progenitors do not increase the total number of infalling subhaloes on to a MW-mass host, but instead focus surrounding subhaloes on to the host causing a clustering in the infall time of subhaloes. This leads to a temporary elevation in the number of subhaloes as well as changes in their cumulative radial profile within the virial radius of the host. Surviving subhaloes associated with a massive progenitor have a large diversity in their orbits. We find that the star formation quenching times of Local Group dwarf spheroidal galaxies ($$10^{5} \mathrm{\, M_{\odot }} \lesssim \mathrm{\mathit{ M}}_{*} \lesssim 10^{7} \mathrm{\, M_{\odot }}$$) are clustered around the times of the most massive accretions suffered by the MW and M31. Our results imply that (a) the quenching time of dwarf spheroidals is a good proxy of their infall time and b) the absence of recently quenched satellites around M31 suggests that M33 is not on its first infall and was accreted much earlier.more » « less
