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The Global Dynamical Atlas of the Milky Way mergers: Constraints from Gaia EDR3 based orbits of globular clusters, stellar streams and satellite galaxies

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arxiv 2202.07660 v1 pith:VYSHJ3TI submitted 2022-02-15 astro-ph.GA

The Global Dynamical Atlas of the Milky Way mergers: Constraints from Gaia EDR3 based orbits of globular clusters, stellar streams and satellite galaxies

classification astro-ph.GA
keywords textitmergersmilkystreamsclustersdynamicalgalaxiesglobal
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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The Milky Way halo was predominantly formed by the merging of numerous progenitor galaxies. However, our knowledge of this process is still incomplete, especially in regard to the total number of mergers, their global dynamical properties and their contribution to the stellar population of the Galactic halo. Here, we uncover the Milky Way mergers by detecting groupings of globular clusters, stellar streams and satellite galaxies in action ($\mathbf{J}$) space. While actions fully characterize the orbits, we additionally use the redundant information on their energy ($\textit{E}$) to enhance the contrast between groupings. For this endeavour, we use $\textit{Gaia}$ EDR3 based measurements of $170$ globular clusters, $41$ streams and $46$ satellites to derive their $\mathbf{J}$ and $\textit{E}$. To detect groups, we use the $\texttt{ENLINK}$ software, coupled with a statistical procedure that accounts for the observed phase-space uncertainties of these objects. We detect a total of $N=6$ groups, including the previously known mergers $\textit{Sagittarius}$, $\textit{Cetus}$, $\textit{Gaia-Sausage/Enceladus}$, $\textit{LMS-1/Wukong}$, $\textit{Arjuna/Sequoia/I'itoi}$ and one new merger that we call $\textit{Pontus}$. All of these mergers, together, comprise $62$ objects ($\approx 25\%$ of our sample). We discuss their members, orbital properties and metallicity distributions. We find that the three most metal-poor streams of our Galaxy -- "C-19" ([Fe/H]$=-3.4$ dex), "Sylgr" ([Fe/H]$=-2.9$ dex) and "Phoenix" ([Fe/H]$=-2.7$ dex) -- are associated with $\textit{LMS-1/Wukong}$; showing it to be the most metal-poor merger. The global dynamical atlas of Milky Way mergers that we present here provides a present-day reference for galaxy formation models.

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Cited by 1 Pith paper

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  1. GalPort: Investigation of the bar in action-angle space

    astro-ph.GA 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0

    GalPort computes multi-timescale action-angle variables and orbital classifications for evolving barred galaxy simulations, with specialised bar phase-space analysis tools.