No abstract

We explore the contribution of the Gaia Sausage to the stellar halo of the Milky Way by making use of a Gaussian mixture model (GMM) and applying it to halo star samples of Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectroscopic Telescope K giants, Sloan Extension for Galactic Understanding and Exploration K giants, and Sloan Digital Sky Survey blue horizontal branch stars. The GMM divides the stellar halo into two parts, of which one represents a more metal-rich and highly radially biased component associated with an ancient, head-on collision referred to as the Gaia Sausage, and the other one is a more metal-poor and isotropic halo. A symmetric bimodal Gaussian is used to describe the distribution of spherical velocity of the Gaia Sausage, and we find that the mean absolute radial velocity of the two lobes decreases with the Galactocentric radius. We find that the Gaia Sausage contributes about 41%–74% of the inner (Galactocentric radius r gc < 30 kpc) stellar halo. The fraction of stars of the Gaia Sausage starts to decline beyond r gc ∼ 25–30 kpc, and the outer halo is found to be significantly less influenced by the Gaia Sausage than the inner halo. After the removal of halo substructures found by integrals of motion, the contribution of the Gaia Sausage falls slightly within r gc ∼ 25 kpc but is still as high as 30%–63%. Finally, we select several possible Sausage-related substructures consisting of stars on highly eccentric orbits. The GMM/Sausage component agrees well with the selected substructure stars in their chemodynamical properties, which increases our confidence in the reliability of the GMM fits.

No abstract

No abstract

We present a study of the influence of the Gaia–Sausage–Enceladus (GSE) on the density shape of the Galactic stellar halo using 11,624 K giants from the LAMOST survey. Every star is assigned a probability of being a member of the GSE based on its spherical velocities and metallicity by a Gaussian mixture model. We divide the stellar halo into two parts by the obtained probabilities, of which one is composed of the GSE members and defined as the GSE-related halo, and the other one is referred to as the GSE-removed halo. Using a nonparametric method, the radial number density profiles of the two stellar halos can be well described by a single power law with a variable flattening q ( r = R 2 + ( Z / q ( r ) ) 2 , ν = ν 0 r − α ). The index α is 4.92 ± 0.12 for the GSE-related halo and 4.25 ± 0.14 for the GSE-removed halo. Both of the stellar halos are vertically flattened at smaller radii but become more spherical at larger radii. We find that the GSE-related halo is less vertically flattened than the GSE-removed halo, and the difference of q between the two stellar halos ranges from 0.07 to 0.15. However, after the consideration of the bias, it is thought to be within 0.08 at most of the radii. Finally, we compare our results with two Milky Way analogs that experience a significant major merger in the TNG50 simulation. The study of the two analogs also shows that the major merger–related stellar halo has a smaller ellipticity than the major merger–removed stellar halo.