The early gaseous and stellar mass assembly of Milky Way-type galaxy halos

TL;DR

This study uses chemo-dynamical simulations within a cosmological framework to investigate how Milky Way-like galaxies accumulated their gas and stellar mass, focusing on satellite accretion and internal evolution.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed evolutionary model of Milky Way-type satellites embedded in dark matter halos, incorporating baryonic processes to study mass transfer and chemical enrichment.

Findings

Satellite accretion contributes significantly to the Milky Way halo mass.

Chemical abundances in halo and satellites reveal their evolutionary history.

Gas and stellar loss from satellites influences galaxy formation processes.

Abstract

How the Milky Way has accumulated its mass over the Hubble time, whether significant amounts of gas and stars were accreted from satellite galaxies, or whether the Milky Way has experienced an initial gas assembly and then evolved more-or-less in isolation is one of the burning questions in modern astronomy, because it has consequences for our understanding of galaxy formation in the cosmological context. Here we present the evolutionary model of a Milky Way-type satellite system zoomed into a cosmological large-scale simulation. Embedded into Dark Matter halos and allowing for baryonic processes these chemo-dynamical simulations aim at studying the gas and stellar loss from the satellites to feed the Milky Way halo and the stellar chemical abundances in the halo and the satellite galaxies.