Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astrophysics – Galaxy Astrophysics
Scientific paper
2010-04-28
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astrophysics
Galaxy Astrophysics
13 pages, 11 figures, submitted to MNRAS
Scientific paper
We model the formation of the Galactic stellar halo via the accretion of satellite galaxies onto a time-dependent semi-cosmological galactic potential. Our goal is to characterize the substructure left by these accretion events in a close manner to what may be possible with the {\it Gaia} mission. We have created a synthetic {\it Gaia} Solar Neighbourhood catalogue by convolving the 6D phase-space coordinates of stellar particles from our disrupted satellites with the latest estimates of the {\it Gaia} measurement errors, and included realistic background contamination due to the Galactic disc(s) and bulge. We find that, even after accounting for the expected observational errors, the resulting phase-space is full of substructure. We are able to successfully isolate roughly 50% of the different satellites contributing to the `Solar Neighbourhood' by applying the Mean-Shift clustering algorithm in energy-angular momentum space. Furthermore, a Fourier analysis of the space of orbital frequencies allows us to obtain accurate estimates of time since accretion for approximately 30% of the recovered satellites.
Brown Anthony G. A.
Gómez Facundo A.
Helmi Amina
Li Yang-Shyang
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