The “Building Blocks” of Stellar Halos
| dc.contributor.author | Oman, Kyle A. | |
| dc.contributor.author | Starkenburg, Else | |
| dc.contributor.author | Navarro, Julio F. | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2018-11-09T20:45:49Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2018-11-09T20:45:49Z | |
| dc.date.copyright | 2017 | en_US |
| dc.date.issued | 2017 | |
| dc.description.abstract | The stellar halos of galaxies encode their accretion histories. In particular, the median metallicity of a halo is determined primarily by the mass of the most massive accreted object. We use hydrodynamical cosmological simulations from the APOSTLE project to study the connection between the stellar mass, the metallicity distribution, and the stellar age distribution of a halo and the identity of its most massive progenitor. We find that the stellar populations in an accreted halo typically resemble the old stellar populations in a present-day dwarf galaxy with a stellar mass ~0.2–0.5 dex greater than that of the stellar halo. This suggests that had they not been accreted, the primary progenitors of stellar halos would have evolved to resemble typical nearby dwarf irregulars. | en_US |
| dc.description.reviewstatus | Reviewed | en_US |
| dc.description.scholarlevel | Faculty | en_US |
| dc.description.sponsorship | We thank the other members of the APOSTLE team, especially T. Sawala, A. Fattahi, M. Schaller, C. Frenk, for their efforts in creating the simulations used in this work. We thank the EAGLE simulation collaboration for providing the galaxy formation model, software and calibration. KAO thanks J. Helly for support in using the merger tree software. We thank the anonymous referees for their useful comments and suggestions. This work was supported by the Science and Technology Facilities Council (grant number ST/F001166/1). This work used the DiRAC Data Centric system at Durham University, operated by the Institute for Computation Cosmology on behalf of the STFC DiRAC HPC Facility (www.dirac.ac.uk). This equipment was funded by BIS National E-infrastructure capital grant ST/K00042X/1, STFC capital grant ST/H008519/1,and STFC DiRAC Operations grant ST/K003267/1 and Durham University. DiRAC is part of the National E-Infrastructure. This research has made use of NASA’s Astrophysics Data System. | en_US |
| dc.identifier.citation | Oman, K.A., Starkenburg, E. & Navarro, J.F. (2017). The “Building Blocks” of Stellar Halos. Galaxies, 5(3), 33. https://doi.org/10.3390/galaxies5030033 | en_US |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://doi.org/10.3390/galaxies5030033 | |
| dc.identifier.uri | http://hdl.handle.net/1828/10282 | |
| dc.language.iso | en | en_US |
| dc.publisher | Galaxies | en_US |
| dc.subject | galaxy formation and evolution | |
| dc.subject | stellar halo | |
| dc.subject | numerical simulations | |
| dc.subject.department | Department of Physics and Astronomy | |
| dc.title | The “Building Blocks” of Stellar Halos | en_US |
| dc.type | Article | en_US |