A Walk on the Retrograde Side (WRS) project. I. Tidying-up the retrograde halo with high-resolution spectroscopy

TL;DR

This study uses high-resolution spectroscopy to analyze retrograde halo stars in the Milky Way, revealing chemical signatures that distinguish different accreted structures and their origins.

Contribution

It provides a detailed chemical tagging of retrograde halo stars, identifying common and distinct origins of substructures through high-resolution spectral analysis.

Findings

Antaeus / L-RL64 and ED-3 share chemical patterns, indicating a common origin.

These structures are chemically distinct from Gaia-Enceladus, confirming separate origins.

Sequoia shows different chemistry from Gaia-Enceladus at low metallicity, with lower Mg and Ca abundance.

Abstract

Relics of ancient accretion events experienced by the Milky Way are predominantly located within the stellar halo of our Galaxy. However, debris from different objects display overlapping distributions in dynamical spaces, making it extremely challenging to properly disentangle their contribution to the build-up of the Galaxy. To shed light on this chaotic context, we started a program aimed at the homogeneous chemical tagging of the local halo of the Milky Way, focusing on the component in retrograde motion, since this is expected to host a large fraction of stars accreted from past mergers. The A Walk on the Retrograde Side (WRS) project targets retrograde halo stars in the Solar Neighborhood having accurate $6$-D phase space information available, measuring the precise chemical abundance of several chemical elements from high-resolution spectroscopy. In this first paper, we present the project and the analysis of high-resolution spectra obtained with UVES at VLT and PEPSI at LBT for $186$ stars. Accurate radial velocity and chemical abundance of several elements have been obtained for all the target stars. In particular we focus on the chemical composition of a specific subset of substructures identified dynamically in the literature. Our study reveals that two among the more recently discovered structures in the retrograde halo, namely Antaeus / L-RL$64$ and ED-$3$, have identical chemical patterns and similar integrals of motion, suggesting a common origin. In turn, the abundance patterns of this unified system differ from that of Gaia-Enceladus, confirming that it is an independent structure. Finally, Sequoia exhibits a different chemistry with respect to that of Gaia-Enceladus at $\mathrm{[Fe/H]} < -1.5$ dex, showcasing an excess of stars with lower Mg and Ca in the common metallicity range.