The Role of Dwarf Galaxies in Building Large Stellar Halos

TL;DR

This paper discusses how dwarf galaxies contribute to the formation of large stellar halos, supported by recent observational advances and future prospects with large telescopes to test hierarchical galaxy formation models.

Contribution

It highlights recent observational evidence and outlines future observational opportunities to test hierarchical galaxy formation involving dwarf galaxies.

Findings

Discovery of kinematically cold substructures around the Milky Way and M31.

Chemical abundance patterns support hierarchical assembly models.

Future telescopes will enable detailed studies of stellar populations in distant galaxies.

Abstract

The hierarchical theory of galaxy formation rests on the idea that smaller galactic structures merge to form the galaxies that we see today. The past decade has provided remarkable observational support for this scenario, driven in part by advances in spectroscopic instrumentation. Multi-object spectroscopy enabled the discovery of kinematically cold substructures around the Milky Way and M31 that are likely the debris of disrupting satellites. Improvements in high-resolution spectroscopy have produced key evidence that the abundance patterns of the Milky Way halo and its dwarf satellites can be explained by Galactic chemical evolution models based on hierarchical assembly. These breakthroughs have depended almost entirely on observations of nearby stars in the Milky Way and luminous red giant stars in M31 and Local Group dwarf satellites. In the next decade, extremely large telescopes will allow observations far down the luminosity function in the known dwarf galaxies, and they will enable observations of individual stars far out in the Galactic halo. The chemical abundance census now available for the Milky Way will become possible for our nearest neighbor, M31. Velocity dispersion measurements now available in M31 will become possible for systems beyond the Local Group such as Sculptor and M81 Group galaxies. Detailed studies of a greater number of individual stars in a greater number of spiral galaxies and their satellites will test hierarchical assembly in new ways because dynamical and chemical evolution models predict different outcomes for halos of different masses in different environments.