A Swing of the Pendulum: The Chemodynamics of the Local Stellar Halo Indicate Contributions from Several Radial Merger Events

Understand

We find that the chemical abundances and dynamics of APOGEE and GALAH stars in the local stellar halo are inconsistent with a scenario in which the inner halo is primarily composed of debris from a single, massive, ancient merger event, as has been proposed to explain the Gaia-Enceladus/Gaia Sausage (GSE) structure.

• The data contains trends of chemical composition with energy which are opposite to expectations for a single massive, ancient merger event, and multiple chemical evolution paths with distinct dynamics are present.
• We use a Bayesian Gaussian mixture model regression algorithm to characterize the local stellar halo, and find that the data is best fit by a model with four components.
• We interpret these components as the VRM, Cronus, Nereus, and Thamnos; however, Nereus and Thamnos likely represent more than one accretion event because the chemical abundance distributions of their member stars contain many peaks.