Tidal Debris Candidates from the $\omega$ Centauri Accretion Event and its Role in Building Up the Milky Way Halo

TL;DR

This study identifies stellar debris from the $$ Centauri system in the Milky Way halo using chemical tagging and neural networks, revealing insights into galaxy formation and accretion events.

Contribution

It introduces a neural network-based chemical tagging method to identify $$ Centauri debris among field stars and analyzes their kinematics and chemical properties.

Findings

463 debris candidates identified with high probability

Most debris show halo-like kinematics, some disk-like

Distinct chemical signatures from Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus members

Abstract

We identify stellar tidal debris from the $\omega$ Centauri ($\omega$ Cen) system among field stars in the APOGEE survey via chemical tagging using a neural network trained on APOGEE observations of the $\omega$ Cen core. We find a total of 463 $\omega$ Cen debris candidates have a probability $P > 0.8$ of sharing common patterns in their chemical abundances across a range of individual elements or element combinations, including [C+N], O, Mg, Al, Si, Ca, Ni, and Fe. Some debris candidates show prograde or retrograde disk-like kinematics, but most show kinematics consistent with the accreted halo, showing high radial actions, $J_{R}$, values. We find that a sample of Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus (GES) members are chemically distinct from the $\omega$ Cen core, suggesting that $\omega$ Cen is associated to an independent merger event shaping the Milky Way halo. However, a connection between GSE and $\omega$ Cen cannot be ruled out. A detailed comparison with $N$-body simulations indicates that the $\omega$ Cen progenitor was a massive dwarf galaxy ($\gtrsim 10^8 M_{\odot}$). The existence of a metal-poor high-$\alpha$ chemically homogeneous halo debris is also reported.