The merging history of the Milky Way

Abstract

The age distribution, and chemical elemental abundances, of stars in the halo of the Milky Way provide constraints on theories of galaxy formation. As one specific example, the accretion of satellite galaxies similar to the present retinue of dwarf spheroidals (dSphs) would provide an observable metal-poor, intermediate-age population. This paper presents a quantitative assessment of any contribution made by such stars to the stellar halo. The bulk of the stellar populations in the halo show a well-defined turn-off, at B - V∼ 0.4, implying that the vast majority of the stars are old. The fraction of stars which lie blueward of this well-defined turn-off, with metallicities similar to that of the present dSphs, is used in this paper to place limits on the importance of the recent accretion of such systems. Very few (≲ 10 per cent) stars are found to be bluer (and, by implication, younger) than this limit, with the highest value found for the more metal-rich halo ([Fe/H] ≳- 1.5 dex). Direct comparison of this statistic with the colour distribution of the turn-off stars in the Carina dwarf allows us to derive an upper limit for the number of mergers of such satellite galaxies into the halo of the Milky Way. This upper limit is ∼60 Carina-like galaxies. The higher metallicity data constrain satellite galaxies like the Fornax dwarf; only ≲6 of these could have been accreted within the last ≲ 10 Gyr. We note that the low star formation rates inferred for dSphs predict distinctive elemental abundance signatures; future data for field halo stars, including candidate younger stars, will provide a further robust test of accretion models.