On the mass assembly history of the Milky Way: clues from its stellar halo

TL;DR

This paper reviews how the structure of the Milky Way's stellar halo reveals its formation history, offering detailed insights into galaxy assembly processes through star-by-star analysis.

Contribution

It provides new insights into the Milky Way's assembly history and measurements of its Galactic components based on detailed stellar halo analysis.

Findings

Insights into the Milky Way's formation history.

Measurements of the structure of Galactic components.

Implications for galaxy formation theories.

Abstract

Stellar halos of galaxies retain crucial clues to their mass assembly history. It is in these galactic components that the remains of cannibalised galactic building blocks are deposited. For the case of the Milky Way, the opportunity to analyse the stellar halo's structure on a star-by-star basis in a multi-faceted approach provides a basis from which to infer its past and assembly history in unrivalled detail. Moreover, the insights that can be gained about the formation of the Galaxy not only help constrain the evolution of our Milky Way, but may also help place constraints on the formation of other disc galaxies in the Universe. This paper includes a summary of work undertaken during a PhD thesis aiming to make progress toward answering the most fundamental question in the field of Galactic archaeology: "How did the Milky Way form?" Through the effort to answer this question, we summarise new insights into aspects of the history of assembly and evolution of our Galaxy and measurements of the structure of various of its Galactic components.