The Debris of the "Last Major Merger" is Dynamically Young

Thomas Donlon II, Heidi Jo Newberg, Robyn Sanderson, Emily Bregou, Danny Horta, Arpit Arora, Nondh Panithanpaisal

Published 2023-10-13Version 1

The Milky Way's (MW) inner stellar halo contains an [Fe/H]-rich component with highly eccentric orbits, often referred to as the "last major merger." Hypotheses for the origin of this component include Gaia-Sausage/Enceladus (GSE), where the progenitor collided with the MW proto-disk 8-11 Gyr ago, and the Virgo Radial Merger (VRM), where the progenitor collided with the MW disk within the last 3 Gyr. These two scenarios make different predictions about observable structure in local phase space, because the morphology of debris depends on how long it has had to phase mix. The recently-identified phase-space folds in Gaia DR3 have positive caustic velocities, making them fundamentally different than the phase-mixed chevrons found in simulations at late times. Roughly 20% of the stars in the prograde local stellar halo are associated with the observed caustics. We compare the observed phase-space distribution to a time-series of FIRE-2 Latte simulations of a GSE-like merger, using a quantitative metric (2D causticality) that measures how phase-mixed a given distribution is. We find that the observed local phase-space distribution best matches the simulated data within 1 Gyr after the merger collides with the host galaxy disk, and certainly not later than 3 Gyr after collision. This is further evidence that the progenitor of the "last major merger" did not collide with the MW proto-disk at early times, as is thought for the GSE, but instead collided with the MW disk within the last few Gyr, consistent with the body of work surrounding the VRM.