The SEGUE K Giant Survey. III. Quantifying Galactic Halo Substructure

TL;DR

This study statistically analyzes the Milky Way's stellar halo using K giant stars from SDSS/SEGUE, revealing extensive substructure, its increase with radius and metallicity, and identifying major streams like Sgr and others.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive quantification of halo substructure using a large K giant sample, confirming trends with radius and metallicity, and identifying known and new stellar streams.

Findings

The halo is highly structured overall.

Substructure increases with Galactocentric radius.

Substructure also increases with metallicity.

Abstract

We statistically quantify the amount of substructure in the Milky Way stellar halo using a sample of 4568 halo K giant stars at Galactocentric distances ranging over 5-125 kpc. These stars have been selected photometrically and confirmed spectroscopically as K giants from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey's SEGUE project. Using a position-velocity clustering estimator (the 4distance) and a model of a smooth stellar halo, we quantify the amount of substructure in the halo, divided by distance and metallicity. Overall, we find that the halo as a whole is highly structured. We also confirm earlier work using BHB stars which showed that there is an increasing amount of substructure with increasing Galactocentric radius, and additionally find that the amount of substructure in the halo increases with increasing metallicity. Comparing to resampled BHB stars, we find that K giants and BHBs have similar amounts of substructure over equivalent ranges of Galactocentric radius. Using a friends-of-friends algorithm to identify members of individual groups, we find that a large fraction (~33%) of grouped stars are associated with Sgr, and identify stars belonging to other halo star streams: the Orphan Stream, the Cetus Polar Stream, and others, including previously unknown substructures. A large fraction of sample K giants (more than 50%) are not grouped into any substructure. We find also that the Sgr stream strongly dominates groups in the outer halo for all except the most metal-poor stars, and suggest that this is the source of the increase of substructure with Galactocentric radius and metallicity.