Chronology of the chemical enrichment of the old Galactic stellar populations

Abstract

Context. Over its history, the Milky Way has accreted several smaller satellite galaxies. These mergers added stars and gas to the Galaxy and affected the properties of the pre-existing stellar populations. Stellar chemical abundances and ages are needed to establish the chronological order of events that occur before, during, and after such mergers. Aims. We report the precise ages ( ~6.5%) and chemical abundances for the TITANS, a sample of old metal-poor dwarfs and subgiants with accurate atmospheric parameters. We also obtain ages with an average precision of 10% for a selected sample of dwarf stars from the GALAH survey. We use these stars, located within ~1 kiloparsec of the Sun, to analyse the chronology of the chemical evolution of in situ and accreted metal-poor stellar populations. Methods. We determined ages via isochrone fitting. For the TITANS, we determined Mg, Si, Ca, Ti, Ni, Ba, and Eu abundances using spectrum synthesis. The [Mg/Fe] abundances of the GALAH stars were re-scaled to be consistent with the abundances of the TITANS. We separated stellar populations by primarily employing chemical abundances and orbits. Results. We find that star formation in the so-called Gaia-Enceladus or Gaia-Sausage galaxy, the last major system to merge with the Milky Way, lasted at least 3 billion years and got truncated 9.6 ± 0.2 billion years ago. This marks with a very high level of precision the last stage of its merging process. We also identified stars of a heated metal-poor in-situ population with virtually null net rotation, probably disturbed by several of the early Milky Way mergers. We show that this population is more metal-rich than Gaia-Enceladus at any moment in time. Conclusions. The sequence of events uncovered in our analysis supports the hypothesis that Gaia-Enceladus truncated the formation of the high-α disc and caused the gas infall that forms the low-α disc.