The two faces of Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus

Read full text
Authors: Milan Quandt-Rodriguez, S. Lucatello, L. Spina, Mario Pasquato, Marco Canducci
Cited by: 1
References: 81

Abstract

Aims. Recent studies suggest that chemical abundances hold the key to disentangling halo substructures, providing a more reliable tracer than dynamics alone. We aim to probe the Milky Way stellar halo using high-dimensional chemical abundances from GALAH DR4. By leveraging multiple nucleosynthesis channels in synergy with integrals of motion (IoM), we extract information hidden in the raw abundance space to perform chemical tagging. Methods. With a graph attention autoencoder, we reconstructed a dynamics-informed, denoised chemical space and identified coherent stellar substructures by applying ensemble clustering. Results. Our method successfully recovers the three largest globular clusters hidden in the dataset, estimates the in situ fraction to be approximately 41%, and chemically characterizes several dynamical halo substructures. Strikingly, stars dynamically associated with Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus (GSE) separate into two chemically distinct clusters. By examining their abundances, energy ( E ), and angular momentum ( L z ) distributions, together with the metallicity trend with E , we connect these clusters to their birthplace within the progenitor by proposing a simple infall scenario: one cluster traces the metal-poor, less evolved outskirts, while the other traces the metal-rich, chemically evolved core. Conclusions. These findings support the picture of GSE as a massive disk galaxy with a noticeable negative metallicity gradient. Moreover, selecting potential GSE members based on their chemical properties rather than solely on their dynamics naturally expands the membership to stars spanning a wider range of IoM.

Fields of Study & Subjects

Astronomy and Astrophysical Research Stellar planetary and galactic studies Astrophysics and Star Formation Studies

Publication details

Journal / source
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Publisher
EDP Sciences
Volume
708
Pages
A159–A159
Publication date
17 February 2026