The stellar halo in Local Group Hestia simulations II. The accreted component

TL;DR

This study uses cosmological simulations to analyze the phase-space structure of accreted stars in galaxy halos, revealing diverse merger remnants, their kinematic properties, and implications for understanding galaxy assembly history.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of the accreted stellar component in simulated galaxies, highlighting the diversity of merger debris and introducing a new kinematic space for disentangling these structures.

Findings

Most galaxies experienced a few dozen mergers, with 1-4 major ones.

Merger debris show diverse density distributions and overlap with in-situ stars.

A new kinematic space helps distinguish different merger remnants.

Abstract

In the Milky Way, recent progress in the exploration of its assembly history is driven by the tremendous amount of high-quality data delivered by Gaia, which has revealed a number of substructures potentially linked to several ancient accretion events. In this work, aiming to explore the phase-space structure of accreted stars, we analyze six M31/MW analogues from the HESTIA suite of cosmological hydrodynamics zoom-in simulations of the Local Group. We found that all the HESTIA galaxies experience a few dozen mergers but only 1-4 mergers have the stellar mass ratio >0.2 where, depending on the halo definition, the most massive merger contributes from 20% to 70% of the total stellar halo. Individual merger remnants show diverse density distributions at z=0, significantly overlapping with each other and with the in-situ stars in the ELz, UV and RVphi coordinates. The mergers debris often change their position in the ELz with time due to the galactic mass growth and the non-axisymmetry of the potential. In agreement with previous works, we show that even individual merger debris exhibit a number of distinct ELz features. In the UV plane, all HESTIA galaxies reveal radially hot, non-rotating or weakly counter-rotating, Gaia-Sausage-like features. We found an age gradient in Elz space for the individual debris, where the youngest stars, formed in the inner regions of accreting systems, deposit to the innermost regions of the host. The bulk of these stars is being formed during the last stages of accretion, making it possible to date the merger. In actions space (Jr, Jz, J\phi), the mergers debris do not appear as isolated substructures but are instead scattered over a large parameters area and overlapping with the in-situ stars. We also introduce a purely kinematic space (Jz/Jr-eccentricity), where different merger debris can be disentangled better from each other and from the in-situ stars.