Cosmological insights into the assembly of the radial and compact stellar halo of the Milky Way

Abstract

Recent studies using Gaia DR2 have identified a massive merger in the history of the Milky Way (MW) whose debris is markedly radial and counterrotating. This event, known as the Gaia-Enceladus/Gaia-Sausage (GE/GS), is also hypothesized to have built the majority of the inner stellar halo. We use the cosmological hydrodynamic simulation Illustris to place this merger in the context of galaxy assembly within $\Lambda$CDM. From $\sim$150 MW analogs, $\sim 80\%$ have experienced at least one merger of similar mass and infall time as GE/GS. Within this sample, 37 have debris as radial as that of the GE/GS, which we dub the Ancient Radial Mergers (ARMs). Counterrotation is not rare among ARMs, with $43\%$ having $>40\%$ of their debris in counterrotating orbits. However, the compactness inferred for the GE/GS debris, given its large $\beta$ and its substantial contribution to the stellar halo, is more difficult to reproduce. The median radius of ARM debris is r${}_{\ast ,deb}\simeq 45$kpc, while GE/GS is thought to be mostly contained within $r\sim 30$ kpc. For most MW analogs, a few mergers are required to build the inner stellar halo, and ARM debris only accounts for $\sim 12\%$ of inner accreted stars. Encouragingly, we find one ARM that is both compact and dominates the inner halo of its central, making it our best GE/GS analog. Interestingly, this merger deposits a significant number of stars (M${}_{\ast }\simeq 1.5\times 10^9{M}_{\odot }$) in the outer halo, suggesting that an undiscovered section of GE/GS may await detection.

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