A massive mess: When a large dwarf and a Milky Way-like galaxy merge

TL;DR

This study analyzes simulations of the Milky Way's merger with Gaia-Enceladus, revealing complex debris structures with varied orbital and chemical properties, highlighting challenges in interpreting galactic merger remnants.

Contribution

It provides detailed analysis of simulated debris from a major galaxy merger, linking orbital characteristics to origin and emphasizing the complexity of identifying merger remnants.

Findings

Gaia-Enceladus likely merged on a retrograde, 30° inclined orbit.

Most debris has high eccentricity (>0.8), but some have low eccentricity (<0.6).

Early lost stars show retrograde motion and lower metallicities.

Abstract

Circa 10 billion years ago the Milky Way merged with a massive satellite, Gaia-Enceladus. To gain insight into the properties of its debris we analyse in detail the suite of simulations from Villalobos & Helmi (2008), which includes an experiment that produces a good match to the kinematics of nearby halo stars inferred from Gaia data. We compare the kinematic distributions of stellar particles in the simulations and study the distribution of debris in orbital angular momentum, eccentricity and energy, and its relation to the mass-loss history of the simulated satellite. We confirm that Gaia-Enceladus probably fell in on a retrograde, 30$^\circ$ inclination orbit. We find that while 75% of the debris in our preferred simulation has large eccentricity ($> 0.8$), roughly 9% has eccentricity smaller than 0.6. Star particles lost early have large retrograde motions, and a subset of these have low eccentricity. Such stars would be expected to have lower metallicities as they stem from the outskirts of the satellite, and hence naively they could be confused with debris associated with a separate system. These considerations seem to apply to some of the stars from the postulated Sequoia galaxy. When a massive discy galaxy merges, it leaves behind debris with a complex phase-space structure, a large range of orbital properties, and a range of chemical abundances. Observationally, this results in substructures with very different properties, which can be misinterpreted as implying independent progeny. Detailed chemical abundances of large samples of stars and tailored hydrodynamical simulations are critical to resolving such conundrums.