Kinematic and Chemical constraints on the formation of M31's inner and outer halo

TL;DR

This study uses extensive spectroscopic data to analyze the kinematic and chemical properties of M31's halo, revealing complex substructures, metallicity gradients, and insights into its formation history through accretion events.

Contribution

It introduces an improved method for measuring metallicities from low S/N spectra and provides new detailed insights into the metallicity and kinematic structure of M31's halo.

Findings

Detection of a kinematically cold substructure at 17 kpc

Strong metallicity gradient along M31's minor axis

Outer halo metallicity drops below -2 dex

Abstract

The halo of M31 shows a wealth of substructures that are consistent with satellite accretion. Here we report on kinematic and abundance results from Keck/DEIMOS spectroscopy in the calcium triplet region of over 3500 red giant star candidates along the minor axis and in off-axis spheroid fields of M31. Our data reach out to large radial distances of 160 kpc. The derived velocity distributions show a kinematically cold substructure at 17 kpc that has been reported before. We devise an improved method to measure accurate metallicities from the calcium triplet in low signal-to-noise spectra using a coaddition of the individual lines. The resulting distribution leads us to note an even stronger gradient in the abundance distribution along M31's minor axis than previously detected. The mean metallicity in the outer halo reaches below -2 dex, with individual values as low as -2.6 dex. In the inner spheroid, at 17-19 kpc, we find a sharp decline of ~0.5 dex in metallicity, which roughly coincides with the edge of an extended disk, previously detected from star count maps. A large fraction of red giants in the most distant fields are likely members of M33's overlapping halo. A comparison of our velocities with those predicted by new N-body simulations argues that the event responsible for the giant Stream is most likely not responsible for the full population of the inner halo; we show further that the abundance distribution of the Stream is different from that of the inner halo, from which it becomes evident that the merger event that formed the outer halo cannot have contributed any significant material to the inner spheroid. All this evidence of severe structure changes in the halo suggests a high degree of infall and stochastic abundance accretion governing the build-up of M31's halo. (Abridged)