What is Missing from the Local Stellar Halo?

TL;DR

This study reveals that local stellar halo observations are biased and do not fully represent the entire Milky Way halo, highlighting the need for surveys extending to the galaxy's outer regions.

Contribution

The paper introduces a composite model of the Milky Way's stellar halo using N-body simulations, showing biases in local halo observations and identifying missing populations.

Findings

Local halo can overestimate or underestimate contributions from certain dwarf galaxies.

Properties like net rotation inferred from local stars can be significantly biased.

Outer halo contains recently accreted, high angular momentum debris missing from local samples.

Abstract

The Milky Way's stellar halo, which extends to $>100$ kpc, encodes the evolutionary history of our Galaxy. However, most studies of the halo to date have been limited to within a few kpc of the Sun. Here, we characterize differences between this local halo and the stellar halo in its entirety. We construct a composite stellar halo model by combining observationally motivated N-body simulations of the Milky Way's nine most massive disrupted dwarf galaxies that account for almost all of the mass in the halo. We find that (1) the representation by mass of different dwarf galaxies in the local halo compared to the whole halo can be significantly overestimated (e.g., the Helmi Streams) or underestimated (e.g., Cetus) and (2) properties of the overall halo (e.g., net rotation) inferred via orbit integration of local halo stars are significantly biased, because e.g., highly retrograde debris from Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus is missing from the local halo. Therefore, extrapolations from the local to the global halo should be treated with caution. From analysis of a sample of 11 MW-like simulated halos, we identify a population of recently accreted ($\lesssim5$ Gyrs) and disrupted galaxies on high angular momenta orbits that are entirely missing from local samples, and awaiting discovery in the outer halo. Our results motivate the need for surveys of halo stars extending to the Galaxy's virial radius.