Unravelling the mass spectrum of destroyed dwarf galaxies with the metallicity distribution function

Understand

Accreted stellar populations are comprised of the remnants of destroyed galaxies, and often dominate the `stellar haloes' of galaxies such as the Milky Way (MW).

• This ensemble of external contributors is a key indicator of the past assembly history of a galaxy.
• We introduce a novel statistical method that uses the unbinned metallicity distribution function (MDF) of a stellar population to estimate the mass spectrum of its progenitors.
• Our model makes use of the well-known mass-metallicity relation of galaxies and assumes Gaussian MDF distributions for individual progenitors: the overall MDF is thus a mixture of MDFs from smaller galaxies.