Estimating accretion times of halo substructures in the Milky Way

TL;DR

This study estimates the accretion times of six stellar halo substructures in the Milky Way using Gaia data, revealing their formation history and implications for the galaxy's potential model.

Contribution

It introduces a method to estimate accretion times of halo substructures using orbital frequencies, with high significance results based on Gaia data.

Findings

GL-1 accreted approximately 5.6 Gyr ago.

GL-4 and GR-1 have accretion times of 6.9 Gyr and 2.0 Gyr respectively.

Results suggest the Milky Way's potential model may overestimate the central mass.

Abstract

To unravel the formation history of the Milky Way, we estimate the accretion times of six phase-space substructures in the stellar halo, using the orbital frequencies toward two spatial directions ($r, \phi$) in spherical coordinates. These substructures, identified in our previous studies, are located in the solar neighbourhood and therefore have high-precision astrometry from Gaia. The uncertainties of the results are determined using the Monte Carlo method, and the significance is established through comparison with random halo samples. The results for the substructure GL-1 in both directions show good consistency and high significance ($4.3\sigma$ and $3.9\sigma$), yielding a combined accretion time of $5.6 \pm 0.1$ Gyr ago, where the uncertainties quoted are statistical only. The substructures GL-4 and GR-1, with smaller pericenters, exhibit higher significance in the less massive potential of the Milky Way, implying that the more massive potential may overestimate the central mass, especially the bulge. The accretion times of GL-4 and GR-1 are $6.9 \pm 0.3$ Gyr with a confidence of $3.7\sigma$, and $2.0 \pm 0.1$ Gyr with a confidence of $4.4\sigma$, respectively. Further constraints on the accretion times of phase-space substructures require more precise astrometric data, e.g., by Gaia DR4, China Space Station Survey Telescope and Roman space telescope.