The Gaia Sausage is the major accretion event that built the stellar halo of the Milky Way galaxy. Here, we provide dynamical and chemical evidence for a second substantial accretion episode, distinct from the Gaia Sausage. The Sequoia Event provided the bulk of the high energy retrograde stars in the stellar halo, as well as the recently discovered globular cluster FSR 1758. There are up to 6 further globular clusters, including ω Centauri, as well as many of the retrograde substructures in Myeong et al. (2018), associated with the progenitor dwarf galaxy, named the Sequoia. The stellar mass in the Sequoia galaxy is ∼ 5 × 10 7 M , whilst the total mass is ∼ 10 10 M , as judged from abundance matching or from the total sum of the globular cluster mass. Although clearly less massive than the Sausage, the Sequoia has a distinct chemodynamical signature. The strongly retrograde Sequoia stars have a typical eccentricity of ∼ 0.6, whereas the Sausage stars have no clear net rotation and move on predominantly radial orbits. On average, the Sequoia stars have lower metallicity by ∼ 0.3 dex and higher abundance ratios as compared to the Sausage. We conjecture that the Sausage and the Sequoia galaxies may have been associated and accreted at a comparable epoch.

The shape and diversity of dwarf galaxy rotation curves is at apparent odds with dark matter halos in a Λ Cold Dark Matter (ΛCDM) cosmology. We use mock data from isolated dwarf galaxy simulations to show that this owes to three main effects. Firstly, stellar feedback heats dark matter, leading to a 'coreNFW' dark matter density profile with a slowly rising rotation curve. Secondly, if close to a recent starburst, large HI bubbles push the rotation curve out of equilibrium, deforming the rotation curve shape. Thirdly, when galaxies are viewed near face-on, their best fit inclination is biased high. This can lead to a very shallow rotation curve that falsely implies a large dark matter core. All three problems can be avoided, however, by a combination of improved mass models and a careful selection of target galaxies. Fitting our coreNFW model to mock rotation curve data, we show that we can recover the rotation curve shape, dark matter halo mass M 200 and concentration parameter c within our quoted uncertainties.We fit our coreNFW model to real data for four isolated dwarf irregulars, chosen to span a wide range of rotation curve shapes. We obtain an excellent fit for NGC 6822 and WLM, with tight constraints on M 200 , and c consistent with ΛCDM. However, IC 1613 and DDO 101 give a poor fit. For IC 1613, we show that this owes to disequilibria and its uncertain inclination i; for DDO 101, it owes to its uncertain distance D. If we assume i IC1613 ∼ 15 • and D DDO101 ∼ 12 Mpc, consistent with current uncertainties, we are able to fit both galaxies very well. We conclude that ΛCDM appears to give an excellent match to dwarf galaxy rotation curves.

ABSTRACT For stars with unresolved companions, motions of the centre of light and that of mass decouple, causing a single-source astrometric model to perform poorly. We show that such stars can be easily detected with the reduced χ2 statistic, or renormalized unit weight error (RUWE), provided as part of Gaia DR2. We convert RUWE into the amplitude of the image centroid wobble, which, if scaled by the source distance, is proportional to the physical separation between companions (for periods up to several years). We test this idea on a sample of known spectroscopic binaries and demonstrate that the amplitude of the centroid perturbation scales with the binary period and the mass ratio as expected. We apply this technique to the Gaia DR2 data and show how the binary fraction evolves across the Hertzsprung–Russell diagram. The observed incidence of unresolved companions is high for massive young stars and drops steadily with stellar mass, reaching its lowest levels for white dwarfs. We highlight the elevated binary fraction for the nearby blue stragglers and blue horizontal branch stars. We also illustrate how unresolved hierarchical triples inflate the relative velocity signal in wide binaries. Finally, we point out a hint of evidence for the existence of additional companions to the hosts of extrasolar hot Jupiters.

Dwarf Irregular galaxies (dIrrs) are the smallest stellar systems with extended HI discs. The study of the kinematics of such discs is a powerful tool to estimate the total matter distribution at these very small scales. In this work, we study the HI kinematics of 17 galaxies extracted from the 'Local Irregulars That Trace Luminosity Extremes, The HI Nearby Galaxy Survey' (LITTLE THINGS). Our approach differs significantly from previous studies in that we directly fit 3D models (two spatial dimensions plus one spectral dimension) using the software 3D BAROLO, fully exploiting the information in the HI datacubes. For each galaxy we derive the geometric parameters of the HI disc (inclination and position angle), the radial distribution of the surface density, the velocity-dispersion (σ v ) profile and the rotation curve. The circular velocity (V c ), which traces directly the galactic potential, is then obtained by correcting the rotation curve for the asymmetric drift. As an initial application, we show that these dIrrs lie on a baryonic Tully-Fisher relation in excellent agreement with that seen on larger scales. The final products of this work are high-quality, ready-to-use kinematic data (V c and σ v ) that we make publicly available. These can be used to perform dynamical studies and improve our understanding of these low-mass galaxies.

We fit the rotation curves of isolated dwarf galaxies to directly measure the stellar mass-halo mass relation (M * − M 200 ) over the mass range 5 × 10 5 < ∼ M * /M < ∼ 10 8 . By accounting for cusp-core transformations due to stellar feedback, we find a monotonic relation with little scatter. Such monotonicity implies that abundance matching should yield a similar M * − M 200 if the cosmological model is correct. Using the 'field galaxy' stellar mass function from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) and the halo mass function from the Λ Cold Dark Matter Bolshoi simulation, we find remarkable agreement between the two. This holds down to M 200 ∼ 5 × 10 9 M , and to M 200 ∼ 5 × 10 8 M if we assume a power law extrapolation of the SDSS stellar mass function below M * ∼ 10 7 M .However, if instead of SDSS we use the stellar mass function of nearby galaxy groups, then the agreement is poor. This occurs because the group stellar mass function is shallower than that of the field below M * ∼ 10 9 M , recovering the familiar 'missing satellites' and 'too big to fail' problems. Our result demonstrates that both problems are confined to group environments and must, therefore, owe to 'galaxy formation physics' rather than exotic cosmology.Finally, we repeat our analysis for a Λ Warm Dark Matter cosmology, finding that it fails at 68% confidence for a thermal relic mass of m WDM < 1.25 keV, and m WDM < 2 keV if we use the power law extrapolation of SDSS. We conclude by making a number of predictions for future surveys based on these results.

Star formation (SF) laws are fundamental relations between the gas content of a galaxy and its star formation rate (SFR) and play key roles in galaxy evolution models. In this paper, we present new empirical SF laws of disc galaxies based on volume densities. Following the assumption of hydrostatic equilibrium, we calculated the radial growth of the thickness of the gaseous discs in the combined gravitational potential of dark matter, stars, and gas for 12 nearby star-forming galaxies. This allowed us to convert the observed surface densities of gas and SFR into the deprojected volume densities. We found a tight correlation with slope in the range 1.3-1.9 between the volume densities of gas (HI+H 2 ) and the SFR with a significantly smaller scatter than the surface-based (Kennicutt) law and no change in the slope over five orders of magnitude. This indicates that taking into account the radial increase of the thickness of galaxy discs is crucial to reconstruct their three-dimensional density profiles, in particular in their outskirts. Moreover, our result suggests that the break in the slope seen in the Kennicutt law is due to disc flaring rather than to a drop of the SF efficiency at low surface densities. Surprisingly, we discovered an unexpected correlation between the volume densities of HI and SFR, indicating that the atomic gas is a good tracer of the cold star-forming gas, especially in low density HI-dominated environments.

We exploit the first Gaia data release to study the properties of the Galactic stellar halo as traced by RR Lyrae. We demonstrate that it is possible to select a pure sample of RR Lyrae using only photometric information available in the Gaia+2MASS catalogue. The final sample contains about 21600 RR Lyrae covering an unprecedented fraction (∼ 60%) of the volume of the Galactic inner halo (R < 28 kpc). We study the morphology of the stellar halo by analysing the RR Lyrae distribution with parametric and non-parametric techniques. Taking advantage of the uniform all-sky coverage, we test halo models more sophisticated than usually considered in the literature, such as those with varying flattening, tilt and/or offset of the halo with respect to the Galactic disc. A consistent picture emerges: the inner halo is well reproduced by a smooth distribution of stars settled on triaxial density ellipsoids. The shortest axis is perpendicular to the Milky Way's disc, while the longest axis forms an angle of ∼ 70 • with the axis connecting the Sun and the Galactic centre. The elongation along the major axis is mild (p = 1.27), and the vertical flattening is shown to evolve from a squashed state with q ≈ 0.57 in the centre to a more spherical q ≈ 0.75 at the outer edge of our dataset. Within the radial range probed, the density profile of the stellar halo is well approximated by a single power-law with exponent α = −2.96. We do not find evidence of tilt or offset of the halo with respect to the Galaxy's disc.

Pair-instability (PI) is expected to open a gap in the mass spectrum of black holes (BHs) between ≈40–65 and ≈120 M⊙. The existence of the mass gap is currently being challenged by the detection of GW190521, with a primary component mass of $85^{+21}_{-14}$ M⊙. Here, we investigate the main uncertainties on the PI mass gap: the 12C(α, γ)16O reaction rate and the H-rich envelope collapse. With the standard 12C(α, γ)16O rate, the lower edge of the mass gap can be 70 M⊙ if we allow for the collapse of the residual H-rich envelope at metallicity Z ≤ 0.0003. Adopting the uncertainties given by the starlib database, for models computed with the 12C(α, γ)16O rate $-1\, \sigma$, we find that the PI mass gap ranges between ≈80 and ≈150 M⊙. Stars with MZAMS &gt; 110 M⊙ may experience a deep dredge-up episode during the core helium-burning phase, that extracts matter from the core enriching the envelope. As a consequence of the He-core mass reduction, a star with MZAMS = 160 M⊙ may avoid the PI and produce a BH of 150 M⊙. In the $-2\, {}\sigma {}$ case, the PI mass gap ranges from 92 to 110 M⊙. Finally, in models computed with 12C(α, γ)16O $-3\, {}\sigma {}$, the mass gap is completely removed by the dredge-up effect. The onset of this dredge-up is particularly sensitive to the assumed model for convection and mixing. The combined effect of H-rich envelope collapse and low 12C(α, γ)16O rate can lead to the formation of BHs with masses consistent with the primary component of GW190521.