Debris streams in the solar neighbourhood as relicts from the formation of the Milky Way

Amina Helmi (), Simon D. M. White, P. Tim de Zeeuw and HongSheng Zhao
Additional contact information
Amina Helmi: Leiden Observatory
Simon D. M. White: Max-Planck-Institut für Astrophysik
P. Tim de Zeeuw: Leiden Observatory
HongSheng Zhao: Leiden Observatory

Nature, 1999, vol. 402, issue 6757, 53-55

Abstract: Abstract It is now generally believed that galaxies were built up through gravitational amplification of primordial fluctuations and the subsequent merging of smaller precursor structures. The stars of the structures that assembled to form the Milky Way should make up much or all of its bulge and halo, in which case one hopes to find ‘fossil’ evidence for those precursor structures in the present distribution of halo stars. Confirmation that this process is continuing came with the discovery of the Saggittarius dwarf galaxy1, which is being disrupted by the Milky Way, but direct evidence that this process provided the bulk of the Milky Way's population of old stars has hitherto been lacking. Here we show that about ten per cent of the metal-poor stars in the halo of the Milky Way, outside the radius of the Sun's orbit, come from a single coherent structure that was disrupted during or soon after the Galaxy's formation. This object had a highly inclined orbit about the Milky Way at a maximum distance of ∼16 kpc, and it probably resembled the Fornax and Sagittarius dwarf spheroidal galaxies.

Date: 1999
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/46980 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nature:v:402:y:1999:i:6757:d:10.1038_46980

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/

DOI: 10.1038/46980

Access Statistics for this article

Nature is currently edited by Magdalena Skipper

More articles in Nature from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().