Evidence from APOGEE for the presence of a major building block of the halo buried in the inner Galaxy

Danny Horta; Ricardo P. Schiavon; J. Ted Mackereth; Joel Pfeffer; Andrew C. Mason; Shobhit Kisku; Francesca Fragkoudi; Carlos Allende Prieto; Katia Cunha; Sten Hasselquist; Jon Holtzman; Steven R. Majewski; David Nataf; Robert W. O'Connell; Mathias Schultheis; Verne V. Smith

doi:10.1093/mnras/staa2987

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Evidence from APOGEE for the presence of a major building block of the halo buried in the inner Galaxy

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Evidence from APOGEE for the presence of a major building block of the halo buried in the inner Galaxy

Danny Horta, Ricardo P. Schiavon, J. Ted Mackereth, Joel Pfeffer, Andrew C. Mason, Shobhit Kisku, Francesca Fragkoudi, Carlos Allende Prieto, Katia Cunha, Sten Hasselquist, …

Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Vol.500(1), pp.1385-1403

01/01/2021

DOI: 10.1093/mnras/staa2987

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Abstract

We report evidence from APOGEE for the presence of a new metal-poor stellar structure located within similar to 4 kpc of the Galactic Centre. Characterized by a chemical composition resembling those of low-mass satellites of the Milky Way, this new inner Galaxy structure (IGS) seems to be chemically and dynamically detached from more metal-rich populations in the inner Galaxy. We conjecture that this structure is associated with an accretion event that likely occurred in the early life of the Milky Way. Comparing the mean elemental abundances of this structure with predictions from cosmological numerical simulations, we estimate that the progenitor system had a stellar mass of similar to 5 x 10(8) M-circle dot, or approximately twice the mass of the recently discovered Gaia-Enceladus/Sausage system. We find that the accreted:in situ ratio within our metal-poor ([Fe/H] < -0.8) bulge sample is somewhere between 1:3 and 1:2, confirming predictions of cosmological numerical simulations by various groups.

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Astronomy & Astrophysics

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Title: Subtitle: Evidence from APOGEE for the presence of a major building block of the halo buried in the inner Galaxy
Creators: Danny Horta - Liverpool John Moores University
Ricardo P. Schiavon - Liverpool John Moores University
J. Ted Mackereth - University of Toronto
Joel Pfeffer - Liverpool John Moores University
Andrew C. Mason - Liverpool John Moores University
Shobhit Kisku - Liverpool John Moores University
Francesca Fragkoudi - Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics
Carlos Allende Prieto - Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias
Katia Cunha - University of Arizona
Sten Hasselquist - University of Utah
Jon Holtzman - New Mexico State University
Steven R. Majewski - University of Virginia
David Nataf - Johns Hopkins University
Robert W. O'Connell - University of Virginia
Mathias Schultheis - Observatoire de la Côte d’Azur
Verne V. Smith - Kitt Peak National Observatory
Resource Type: Journal article
Publication Details: Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Vol.500(1), pp.1385-1403
Publisher: Oxford Univ Press
DOI: 10.1093/mnras/staa2987
ISSN: 0035-8711
eISSN: 1365-2966
Number of pages: 19
Grant note: University of Notre Dame ERC-CoG-646928-Multi-Pop / European Research Council; European Research Council (ERC) New York University Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico AST-1801940 / NSF; National Science Foundation (NSF) University of Utah Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics; Smithsonian Institution University of Toronto Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; United States Department of Energy (DOE) Ohio State University
Language: English
Date published: 01/01/2021
Academic Unit: Physics and Astronomy
Record Identifier: 9984701724102771

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