Berčuk, Ines (2024) The small galaxies that built up the Galactic halo. Bachelor's Thesis, Astronomy.
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Abstract
The Milky Way halo is thought to have been created as a result of many galactic mergers in the past. However, a qualitative analysis of its progenitors and their masses is still incomplete. In order to uncover the merger mysteries of the galactic halo, we use a novel statistical method (Deason et al., 2023) based on the mass-metallicity relation. This well-known relationship describes that more massive galaxies result in more metal-rich stars, while the opposite is true for less massive galaxies and metal-poor stars. Using a catalogue of stars on exclusively halo-like orbits (Viswanathan et al., 2023) with high-quality [Fe/H] measurements down to the extremely metal-poor regime (Martin et al., 2023), we probe even the smallest accreted galaxies in the formation history of the Milky Way halo. We find that the mass-spectrum of its progenitors is dominated by thousands of small galaxies with masses ≲ 10^5 M⊙, while we uncover only a few tens of progenitors with masses larger than this value and a single massive galaxy with mass ∼ 10^8 M⊙. Using the mass-spectrum, we find the stellar mass of the halo of (6.1 ± 2.1)· 10^8 M⊙. These findings bring us closer to disentangling the complete merger history of the Milky Way halo.
| Item Type: | Thesis (Bachelor's Thesis) |
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| Supervisor name: | Starkenburg, E. |
| Degree programme: | Astronomy |
| Thesis type: | Bachelor's Thesis |
| Language: | English |
| Date Deposited: | 17 Jul 2024 07:56 |
| Last Modified: | 17 Jul 2024 07:56 |
| URI: | https://fse.studenttheses.ub.rug.nl/id/eprint/33410 |
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