Abstract

With the upcoming release of the Gaia catalog and the many multiplexed spectroscopic surveys on the horizon, we are rapidly moving into a new data-driven era in the study of the Milky Way’s stellar halo. When combined, these data sets will give us a many-dimensional view of stars in accreted structures in the halo that includes both dynamical information about their orbits and chemical information about their formation histories. Using simulated data from the state-of-the-art Latte simulations of Milky-Way-like galaxies, which include hydrodynamics, feedback, and chemical evolution in a cosmological setting, we demonstrate that while dynamical information alone can be used to constrain models of the Galactic mass distribution in the halo, including the extra dimensions provided by chemical abundances can improve these constraints as well as assist in untangling different accreted components.

Highlights

  • Our knowledge of the Galaxy in which we live, the Milky Way (MW), is poised to undergo a revolution in the ten years thanks to a new generation of state-of-the-art stellar surveys.These include photometric surveys like PanSTARRS [1] and LSST [2], spectroscopic surveys like and extending to LSST and WFIRST [8]

  • The Galactic renaissance will include far greater insight into the chemical abundances of stars thanks to efforts like the Cannon [9], which can translate the abundance patterns generated from smaller high-resolution spectroscopic surveys like APOGEE [10], GALAH [11], and the Gaia-ESO survey [12] into the larger medium- and low-resolution spectroscopic surveys listed above

  • Calculating the mutual information (MI) for a distribution involves estimating the density from a finite number of points, so adding extra dimensions is costly and can introduce noise in the MI value and in the best fit

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Summary

Introduction

Our knowledge of the Galaxy in which we live, the Milky Way (MW), is poised to undergo a revolution in the ten years thanks to a new generation of state-of-the-art stellar surveys These include photometric surveys like PanSTARRS [1] and LSST [2], spectroscopic surveys like and extending to LSST and WFIRST [8]. It is not an exaggeration to say that ten years we can expect to have complete phase-space information for stars in the Galaxy nearly to its virial radius, complemented by 10–20 dimensions of chemical abundance information This new high-dimensional view of the Galaxy demands new approaches to understanding its contents. We discuss how this combined phase and abundance space will be uniquely powerful for setting constraints on the MW’s dark matter (DM) distribution and untangling the building blocks of its accreted stellar halo, allowing us to use our Galaxy as a time machine to study ancient dwarf galaxies

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