Work

Stirring things up: Bar-induced substructures in the stellar halo of a cosmological Milky Way analogue

Year: 2026

Type: article

Abstract: ABSTRACT The stellar halo of the Milky Way contains the remnants of past accretion events, which could be detectable as substructures in the classical integrals of motion space, such as energy and angular momentum ($E-L_z$). However, our Galaxy also contains a non-axisymmetric stellar bar, which traps stars in resonant orbits, leading to substructures in phase-space. Using a high-resolution magnetohydrodynamic cosmological zoom-in simulation of a Milky Way analogue, we explore the connection between the bar and the accreted stellar halo. We find that the bar induces prominent substructures, or ‘ridges’, in $E-L_z$, caused by the resonances. The most pronounced of these is caused by the corotation and the retrograde 1:1 resonances, with weaker ridges visible due to the prograde 1:1 and outer Lindblad resonance. The ridges are present across much of the stellar halo, with variations in radius due to the morphology of different orbital families. We explore the scattering of orbits at the resonances, finding that stars trapped at the 1:1 retrograde resonance become more circularized and have more negative angular momentum. Additionally, stars can move between the corotation and retrograde 1:1 families, thus alternating between prograde and retrograde motion. Due to these scatterings and the pre-existing metallicity gradients in the accreted population, the bar-induced substructures have distinct metallicities compared to stars in the surrounding phase-space. Our results suggest the need for caution when searching the Milky Way stellar halo for accreted substructures in both integral of motions and chemical spaces, since these can be induced by internal perturbations.

Source: Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stag841