What Is Missing from the Local Stellar Halo?

Abstract

The Milky Way’s stellar halo, which extends to >100 kpc, encodes the evolutionary history of our Galaxy. However, most studies of the halo to date have been limited to within a few kiloparsecs of the Sun. Here, we characterize differences between this local halo and the stellar halo in its entirety. We construct a composite stellar halo model by combining observationally motivated N-body simulations of the Milky Way’s nine most massive disrupted dwarf galaxies that account for almost all of the mass in the halo. We find that (i) the representation by mass of different dwarf galaxies in the local halo compared to the whole halo can be significantly overestimated (e.g., the Helmi streams) or underestimated (e.g., Cetus) and (ii) properties of the overall halo (e.g., net rotation) inferred via orbit integration of local halo stars are significantly biased because, for example, highly retrograde debris from Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus is missing from the local halo. Therefore, extrapolations from the local to the global halo should be treated with caution. From analysis of a sample of 11 Milky Way–like simulated halos, we contextualize these results and identify a population of recently accreted (≲5 Gyrs) and disrupted galaxies on high-angular-momenta orbits that are entirely missing from local samples and likely awaiting discovery in the outer halo. Our results motivate the need for surveys of halo stars extending out to the Galaxy’s virial radius.