The accreted stellar halo as a window on halo assembly in L* galaxies

Abstract

Abstract Theory and observations agree that the accreted stellar haloes (ASHs) of Milky Way-like galaxies display significant scatter. I take advantage of this stochasticity to invert the link between halo assembly history (HAH) and ASH, using mock ASHs corresponding to 750 ΛCDM HAHs, sharing a final virial mass of Mh(z = 0) = 1012.25M⊙. Hosts with poor/rich ASHs assemble following orthogonal growth-patterns. Hosts with rich ASHs experience accretion events (AEs) with high virial mass ratios (HVMRs, Ms/Mh ≳ 0.1) at 0.5 ≲ zinfall ≲ 1.5, in a phase of fast growth. This maximizes the accreted stellar mass under the condition these satellites are disrupted by z = 0. At similar times, hosts with poor ASHs grow slowly through minor mergers, with only very recent HVMR AEs: this results in a globally more abundant satellite population and in distinctive surviving massive satellites (stellar mass log Ms, */M⊙ ≳ 9). Several properties of the Milky Way are in agreement with the predictions of this framework for hosts with poor, concentrated ASHs, including: (i) the recent infall of Sagittarius and Magellanic Clouds, (ii) the likely higher-than-average concentration of its dark halo and (iii) the signatures of fast chemical enrichment of a sizable fraction of its halo stellar populations.