Characterizing the formation history of Milky Way-like stellar haloes with model emulators

TL;DR

This study employs model emulators to analyze how different galaxy formation histories influence the observable properties of Milky Way-like stellar haloes, highlighting the importance of statistical approaches due to merger history variability.

Contribution

It introduces the use of Gaussian process-based model emulators to efficiently explore galaxy formation parameters and demonstrates their effectiveness in recovering input parameters from mock data.

Findings

Successful recovery of input parameters when merger history is known

Merger history significantly affects parameter estimation

Different merger histories can produce similar observational data

Abstract

We use the semi-analytic model ChemTreeN, coupled to cosmological N-body simulations, to explore how different galaxy formation histories can affect observational properties of Milky Way-like galaxies' stellar haloes and their satellite populations. Gaussian processes are used to generate model emulators that allow one to statistically estimate a desired set of model outputs at any location of a p-dimensional input parameter space. This enables one to explore the full input parameter space orders of magnitude faster than could be done otherwise. Using mock observational data sets generated by ChemTreeN itself, we show that it is possible to successfully recover the input parameter vectors used to generate the mock observables if the merger history of the host halo is known. However, our results indicate that for a given observational data set the determination of "best fit" parameters is highly susceptible to the particular merger history of the host. Very different halo merger histories can reproduce the same observational dataset, if the "best fit" parameters are allowed to vary from history to history. Thus, attempts to characterize the formation history of the Milky Way using these kind of techniques must be performed statistically, analyzing large samples of high resolution N-body simulations.