The Unmixed Debris of Gaia-Sausage/Enceladus in the Form of a Pair of Halo Stellar Overdensities

We keep only those stars from SEGUE (Rockosi et al. 2022) with S/N > 20 pixel⁻¹. We limit our SEGUE sample to [Fe/H] < −0.5 to decrease contamination from disk stars. We also select stars within 4500 < T_eff/K < 6500, which ensures that the stellar parameters are accurately determined and avoids large uncertainties. The abundance data from SEGUE are less precise (uncertainties in [Fe/H] ≥ 0.1) but with the advantage of observing toward fainter-magnitude stars, providing a larger sample for each overdensity, which allows a robust determination of the orbital eccentricity and metallicity distributions. To obtain reliable abundances for a larger set of elements, we expand our analysis using APOGEE data.

In order to obtain stars with high-quality elemental abundances, we select only those sources from APOGEE data release 17 (DR17; Abdurro'uf et al. 2022) catalog with good spectroscopic flags (ASPCAPFLAG == 0), good synthetic spectral fitting (ASPCAP_CHI2 < 25), good estimates of [Fe/H], [Mg/Fe], [Al/Fe], [Mn/Fe], [Ni/Fe], [C/Fe], [N/Fe], and [O/Fe] (i.e., flagged == 0), S/N > 50 pixel⁻¹, and we remove stars with suspect radial velocities (STARFLAG == SUSPECT_RV_COMBINATION). Lastly, we apply additional cuts (4000 <T_eff/K < 6000; $\mathrm{log}g\lt 3$) in order to select only giant stars.

We combine (15 search radius) the aforementioned samples with Gaia Early Data Release 3 (Gaia Collaboration et al. 2021) to obtain the absolute proper motions and their uncertainties. To ensure good astrometric solutions, we impose renormalized unit weight errors within the recommended range (RUWE ≤ 1.4; Lindegren et al. 2021). Besides that, we remove stars with parallax < −5 and with low fidelity (fidelity_v2 < 0.5; see Rybizki et al. 2022). The radial velocities are from the spectroscopic surveys, and the distances were obtained with the StarHorse code, specifically from the new releases where several large-scale spectroscopic surveys are matched to Gaia EDR3 data. For APOGEE DR17, distance estimates are publicly available ¹¹ and, for SEGUE, these will be made available alongside a forthcoming paper (A. B. A. Queiroz et al. 2022, in preparation). We selected only stars with fractional (Gaussian) uncertainties of their nominal distance values <20%.

We distinguish HAC into two substructures HAC-South (HAC-S) and HAC-North (HAC-N). Under the assumption that both regions have the same origin (Iorio & Belokurov 2019; Simion et al. 2019; Naidu et al. 2021), they should have similar chemodynamical properties. We select stars from HAC-S and HAC-N with the following criteria: 30° < l < 60°, −45° < b < −20°, and 20° < b < 45°, respectively. For VOD, our selection is based on the following Galactic coordinate cuts: 270° < l < 330° and 50° < b < 75°. For both overdensities, we consider d_⊙ between 10 and 20 kpc, with a mean fractional uncertainty of ∼13% in this range. These delineated criteria were applied to both SEGUE and APOGEE samples. Figure 1 shows the resulting spatial distribution of stars selected from HAC and VOD in SEGUE.

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To obtain the orbital parameters, we employ the axisymmetric Galactic potential of McMillan (2017). The adopted distance from the Sun to the Galactic center is 8.2 kpc (Bland-Hawthorn & Gerhard 2016), the circular velocity at this position is v_circ = 232.8 km s⁻¹, and the peculiar motion of the Sun with respect to the local circular orbit is (U, V, W)_⊙ = (11.10, 12.24, 7.25) km s⁻¹ (Schönrich et al. 2010). We integrated the orbits forward in time for 10 Gyr. For each star, we construct a set of 100 initial conditions using a Monte Carlo technique taking into account the observational uncertainties in d_⊙, proper motions, and line-of-sight velocities. The final dynamical parameters are taken as the medians of the derived distributions and associated uncertainties are the 16th and 84th percentiles.

In order to compare whether the stellar overdensities share similar dynamical properties with GSE, we use a chemodynamical criterion (Limberg et al. 2022; see their Equation (1)) ¹² to identify nearby—within 5 kpc from the Sun—GSE stars, which is designed to yield maximum purity. The final SEGUE/APOGEE samples of HAC-S, HAC-N, and VOD contain 231/11, 516/21, and 556/22 stars, respectively.

We take advantage of the large number of the HAC-S, HAC-N, and VOD stars found in SEGUE to characterize the orbital eccentricity and metallicity distributions of these stellar overdensities with the purpose of testing their connection with GSE. We explore their distributions of orbital eccentricity in Figure 2. The first panel shows the full sample, and overall the overdensities have similar eccentricity distributions; they are dominated (∼65%) by stars with e > 0.7, similar to GSE (Belokurov et al. 2018; Myeong et al. 2018; Limberg et al. 2021), but have an extended tail toward lower eccentricity values.

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We also show the eccentricity distribution at different metallicity intervals (second to fifth panels of Figure 2). The overdensities have similar distributions across all the metallicity intervals but differ from the GSE. For instance, in the very metal-poor regime (VMP; [Fe/H] < −2.0), the overdensities have roughly equal amounts of stars in each eccentricity bin, whereas the GSE continues to be dominated by stars with e > 0.7. Toward higher metallicities (−1.5 < [Fe/H] < −1.0), where the peak of the GSE metallicity distribution function (MDF) is located (see Limberg et al. 2022 and references therein), the overdensities are dominated by stars with e > 0.7 and, differently from GSE, show an extended tail toward lower eccentricities.

In addition, Figure 2 shows that the contribution of low-eccentricity stars is higher toward the low-metallicity regime ([Fe/H] < −1.5). The absence of the low-eccentricity tail in the GSE sample could be a bias due to our selection criterion, which favors stars with vertical component of the angular momentum (L_z ) ∼ 0. On the other hand, simulations mimicking GSE-like mergers (Naidu et al. 2021; Amarante et al. 2022) show that the vast majority of the accreted stars end up with e > 0.7. Indeed, models that take into account star formation and a self-consistent chemical enrichment show that the accreted stars on relatively lower eccentricities are more metal-poor compared to those on higher eccentricities (see Figure 6 in Amarante et al. 2022). Only a small fraction (∼1%–8%) of the accreted stars end up on less eccentric orbits (e < 0.7), and these are typically more metal-poor (by ∼0.2–0.7 dex) than those with e > 0.7. Therefore, part of the metal-poor stars on low-eccentricity orbits found in SEGUE could be the metal-poor tail of GSE, as expected by the aforementioned idealized GSE-like merger models. We note that the metal-poor stars in our HAC/VOD sample have −1500 ≲ L_z ≲ 1500 kpc km s⁻¹ and have roughly the same fraction of prograde and retrograde orbits. Thus, other mildly eccentric (e ∼ 0.5) exclusively retrograde (L_z ≲ −1500 kpc km s⁻¹) halo structures can be discarded as responsible for the low-metallicity and low-eccentricity component identified here.

The presence of the low-eccentricity stars in both HAC-S, HAC-N, and VOD may also be interpreted as the existence of other merger(s) event(s) that contributed less significantly to the formation of these overdensities. We verified that the upper limit of contamination by stars from the Sagittarius stream in both overdensities is <5% following the criteria of Naidu et al. (2020; see also Peñarrubia & Petersen 2021). Another potential contributor to the low-eccentricity regime might be LMS-1/Wukong (Naidu et al. 2020; Yuan et al. 2020; Horta et al. 2022), which contains mostly VMP stars with e < 0.7. This structure is also composed of stars on polar orbits (J_z > J_r ) that spatially overlap with VOD and HAC (Yuan et al. 2020). We note, however, that LMS-1 members are exclusively on prograde orbits, which is not the case for the VMP low-eccentricity stars in our HAC/VOD sample.

Finally, in situ stellar populations could contribute to the stellar overdensities, such as the Splash (Belokurov et al. 2020) and Aurora (Belokurov & Kravtsov 2022). The Splash consists of metal-rich ([Fe/H] > −0.7) stars on mildly eccentric orbits (e > 0.5), while the majority of HAC and VOD low-eccentricity stars have [Fe/H] < −1.5. Aurora is mainly characterized by its thick-disk-like chemistry, i.e., high [α/Fe] at the same [Fe/H] in comparison to the Galactic halo/GSE. Moreover, Aurora should be identifiable at metallicities of −1.5 < [Fe/H] < −1.0, which is not the case for the low-eccentricity populations identified within HAC/VOD. Therefore, given the present data, we conclude that is is unlikely that an in situ contribution could be the major non-GSE contaminant to the stellar overdensities.

Figure 3 shows the MDF for the full sample (left panel) and different eccentricity intervals (middle and right panels) for the SEGUE stars from the overdensities and GSE. In the left panel, the MDF of GSE is similar to those from the different overdensities, with a slight difference toward the VMP regime. An equivalent result has been obtained by Naidu et al. (2021), with metallicities from the H3 survey.

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In the middle panel, we show the MDFs for stars with e > 0.7, which is the range of the eccentricity characteristic of GSE. We estimate the medians and median absolute deviations of the distributions by bootstrap sampling with 10⁴ iterations, accounting for the uncertainties in metallicity. The GSE median [Fe/H] value in the SEGUE sample is $-{1.39}_{+0.01}^{-0.01}$ dex with median absolute deviation of 0.20 dex, which is in agreement with the median [Fe/H] of HAC-S, HAC-N, and VOD; $-{1.51}_{+0.06}^{-0.06}$, $-{1.47}_{+0.05}^{-0.05}$, and $-{1.35}_{+0.03}^{-0.03}$ dex, respectively. Differences in the median [Fe/H] between all overdensities and GSE are smaller than the typical uncertainties in SEGUE (≥0.1 dex). We also note that these listed median [Fe/H] values are well within literature determinations for GSE (see discussion in Limberg et al. 2022).

In the right panel of Figure 3, we show the MDFs for e < 0.7. The most noticeable feature in this low-eccentricity regime is the excess of VMP stars in both HAC and VOD in comparison to their high-eccentricity counterparts (middle panel). This behavior is the same as previously identified in Figure 2. The remaining stars from our local GSE selection (<1%) are also mostly VMP, which might indicate either contamination from other accreted substructures (Helmi 2020) or a low-metallicity component of GSE itself, although we reinforce that the lack of low-eccentric GSE stars might be a bias due to our selection criteria.

We took advantage of the SEGUE sample to show that the bulk of the stars from the stellar overdensities have similar eccentricity and metallicity distributions, which are also compatible with GSE, suggesting that they share a common origin. We now explore in detail the chemical-abundance patterns of the overdensities with the available data from APOGEE.

Figure 4 shows the abundance of stars from HAC-S, HAC-N, VOD, and GSE in the [Fe/H]–[Mg/Fe], [Mg/Mn]–[Al/Fe], [Al/Fe]–[Fe/H], and [Ni/Fe]–[(C+N)/O] planes. In all panels, the yellow lines are isodensity contours associated with our GSE sample and the background 2D histograms show stars from APOGEE. All the overdensities clearly overlap with the contour of GSE and occupy the region of the chemical-abundance planes dominated by accreted populations. This indicates that HAC-S/N and VOD share chemical properties compatible with GSE, favoring a scenario of a common origin for these substructures. However, we note that the origin of the VMP stars on low-eccentricity orbits identified in Section 3.1 could not be explored with APOGEE data given that it does not reach such low-metallicity regime.

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To further analyze this chemodynamical compatibility, we select stars from HAC and VOD that have the characteristics of ancient accreted populations in the [Mg/Mn]–[Al/Fe] space (Hawkins et al. 2015; Das et al. 2020) and eccentricity consistent with GSE members (e > 0.7). The stars that do not satisfy these criteria (region of [Mg/Mn]–[Al/Fe] diagram delimited by red lines; Limberg et al. 2022) are represented by the empty symbols in Figure 4, and we note that only a small fraction (∼12%) occupy the in situ locus. This exercise makes it clear that the bulk of stars of the stellar overdensities studied in this work occupy the same region of GSE population in all chemical-abundance planes.

In Figure 5, we show orbital parameters of HAC-S, HAC-N, VOD, and GSE. In the left panel, we see that the stellar overdensities occupy a well-defined region, which is dominated by GSE stars, in the total orbital energy (E) versus L_z plane. The right panel (e–L_z ) shows that the majority of HAC/VOD stars in this sample are on highly eccentric orbits and low average L_z , which are dynamical properties of GSE. In general, all the aforementioned chemodynamical properties suggest that the halo overdensities studied in this work share a common origin with GSE.

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The stellar overdensities of our study are dynamically compatible with the GSE, which dominates the stellar content of the inner halo (Deason et al. 2018; Naidu et al. 2020). This combination of orbital parameters was also identified in other works (Simion et al. 2019; Balbinot & Helmi 2021) and is in contradiction with the hypothesis that these structures are dominated by stars on polar orbits connected in a polar ring as speculated by Jurić et al. (2008).