Swarming in stellar streams: Unveiling the structure of the Jhelum stream with ant colony-inspired computation

Abstract

The halo of the Milky Way galaxy hosts multiple dynamically coherent substructures known as stellar streams that are remnants of tidally disrupted orbiting systems such as globular clusters (GCs) and dwarf galaxies (DGs). A particular case is that of the Jhelum stream, which is known for its unusual and complex morphology. Using the available data from the Gaia DR3 catalog, we extracted a region on the sky that contains Jhelum, and fine-tuned this selection by enforcing limits on the magnitude and proper motion of the selected stars. We then applied the novel Locally Aligned Ant Technique (LAAT) on the position and proper motion space of stars belonging to the selected region to highlight the stars that are closely aligned with a local manifold in the data and the stars belonging to regions of high local density. We find that the overdensity representing the stream in proper motion space is composed of two components, and show the correspondence of these two signals to the previously reported narrow and broad spatial components of Jhelum. We then made use of the radial velocity measurements provided by the S5 survey and confirm, for the first time, a separation between the stars belonging to the two components in radial velocity. We show that the narrow and broad components have velocity dispersions of 4.84+1.23-0.79 km s-1 and 19.49+2.19-1.84 km s−1, and metallicity dispersions of 0.15+0.18-0.10 and 0.34+0.13-0.09, respectively. These measurements, as well as the given difference in component widths, could be explained with a probable scenario where Jhelum is the remnant of a GC embedded within a DG and where both were accreted onto the Milky Way during their infall. Although the properties of Jhelum could be explained with this merger scenario, other progenitors of the narrow component remain possible such as a nuclear star cluster or a DG. To rule these possibilities out, we would need more observational data of member stars of the stream. Our analysis shows that the internal structure of streams holds great information on their past formation history, and therefore provides further insight into the merger history of the Milky Way.