A Comparative Analysis of the Chemical Compositions of Gaia-Enceladus/Sausage and Milky Way Satellites using APOGEE

TL;DR

This study compares the chemical compositions of Gaia-Enceladus/Sausage and Milky Way satellites using APOGEE data, revealing differences in star formation history and chemical signatures that inform galaxy evolution.

Contribution

It provides a detailed chemical analysis of Gaia-Enceladus/Sausage compared to MW satellites, highlighting early star formation and chemical evolution differences.

Findings

GE/S stars are mostly in the 'accreted' chemical locus.

Stars in MW satellites show lower [Mg/Mn] at high metallicity.

GE/S had a higher early star formation rate than similar-mass satellites.

Abstract

We use data from the 17th data release of the Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment (APOGEE 2) to contrast the chemical composition of the recently discovered Gaia Enceladus/Sausage system (GE/S) to those of ten Milky Way (MW) dwarf satellite galaxies: LMC, SMC, Bo\"otes I, Carina, Draco, Fornax, Sagittarius, Sculptor, Sextans and Ursa Minor. Our main focus is on the distributions of the stellar populations of those systems in the [Mg/Fe]-[Fe/H] and [Mg/Mn]-[Al/Fe] planes, which are commonly employed in the literature for chemical diagnosis and where dwarf galaxies can be distinguished from in situ populations. We show that, unlike MW satellites, a GE/S sample defined purely on the basis of orbital parameters falls almost entirely within the locus of "accreted" stellar populations in chemical space, which is likely caused by an early quenching of star formation in GE/S. Due to a more protracted history of star formation, stars in the metal-rich end of the MW satellite populations are characterized by lower [Mg/Mn] than those of their GE/S counterparts. The chemical compositions of GE/S stars are consistent with a higher early star formation rate than MW satellites of comparable and even higher mass, suggesting that star formation in the early universe was strongly influenced by other parameters in addition to mass. We find that the direction of the metallicity gradient in the [Mg/Mn]-[Al/Fe] plane of dwarf galaxies is an indicator of the early star formation rate of the system