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Abstract Our understanding of the assembly timeline of the Milky Way has been transforming along with the dramatic increase in astrometric and spectroscopic data available over the past several years. Many substructures in chemo-dynamical space have been discovered and identified as the remnants of various galactic mergers. To investigate the timeline of these mergers, we select main-sequence turnoff and subgiant stars (MSTOs) from the H3 survey, finding members in seven metal-poor components of the halo: Gaia-Sausage/Enceladus (GSE), the Helmi Streams, Thamnos, Sequoia, Wukong/LMS-1, Arjuna, and I’itoi. We also select out a metal-poor in situ population to facilitate comparison to the evolution of the Milky Way itself at these early epochs. We fit individual isochrone ages to the MSTOs in each of these substructures and use the resulting age distributions to infer simple star formation histories (SFHs). For GSE, we resolve an extended SFH that truncates ≈10 Gyr ago, as well as a clear age–metallicity relation. From this age distribution and measured SFH we infer that GSE merged with the Milky Way at a time 9.5–10.2 Gyr ago, in agreement with previous estimates. We infer that the other mergers occurred at various times ranging from 9 to 13 Gyr ago, and that the metal-poor in situ Galaxy built up within only a few billion years. These results reinforce the emerging picture that both the disk and halo of the Milky Way experienced a rapid assembly. 

Abstract We presentAugustus, a catalog of distance, extinction, and stellar parameter estimates for 170 million stars from 14 mag <r< 20 mag and with ∣b∣ > 10° drawing on a combination of optical to near-infrared photometry from Pan-STARRS, 2MASS, UKIDSS, and unWISE along with parallax measurements from Gaia DR2 and 3D dust extinction maps. After applying quality cuts, we find 125 million objects have “high-quality” posteriors with statistical distance uncertainties of ≲10% for objects with well-constrained stellar types. This is a substantial improvement over the distance estimates derived from Gaia parallaxes alone and in line with the recent results from Anders et al. We find the fits are able to reproduce the dereddened Gaia color–magnitude diagram accurately, which serves as a useful consistency check of our results. We show that we are able to detect large, kinematically coherent substructures in our data clearly relative to the input priors, including the Monoceros Ring and the Sagittarius Stream, attesting to the quality of the catalog. Our results are publicly available at doi:10.7910/DVN/WYMSXV. An accompanying interactive visualization can be found athttp://allsky.s3-website.us-east-2.amazonaws.com.