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19 April 2024 |
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Article overview
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The Dominance of Metal-Rich Streams in Stellar Halos: A Comparison Between Substructure in M31 and Lambda-CDM Models | | Karoline M. Gilbert
; Andreea S. Font
; Kathryn V. Johnston
; Puragra Guhathakurta
; | | Date: |
7 Aug 2009 | | Abstract: | Extensive photometric and spectroscopic surveys of the Andromeda galaxy (M31)
have discovered tidal debris features throughout M31’s stellar halo. We present
stellar kinematics and metallicities in fields with identified substructure
from our on-going SPLASH survey of M31 red giant branch stars with the DEIMOS
spectrograph on the Keck II 10-m telescope. Radial velocity criteria are used
to isolate members of the kinematically-cold substructures. The substructures
are shown to be metal-rich relative to the rest of the dynamically hot stellar
population in the fields in which they are found. We calculate the mean
metallicity and average surface brightness of the various kinematical
components in each field, and show that, on average, higher surface brightness
features tend to be more metal-rich than lower surface brightness features.
Simulations of stellar halo formation via accretion in a cosmological context
are used to illustrate that the observed trend can be explained as a natural
consequence of the observed dwarf galaxy mass-metallicity relation. A
significant spread in metallicity at a given surface brightness is seen in the
data; we show that this is due to time effects, namely the variation in the
time since accretion of the tidal streams’ progenitor onto the host halo. We
show that in this theoretical framework a relationship between the
alpha-enhancement and surface brightness of tidal streams is expected, which
arises from the varying times of accretion of the progenitor satellites onto
the host halo. Thus, measurements of the alpha-enrichment, metallicity, and
surface brightness of tidal debris can be used to reconstruct the luminosity
and time of accretion onto the host halo of the progenitors of tidal streams. | | Source: | arXiv, 0908.1111 | | Services: | Forum | Review | PDF | Favorites | |
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