Streams, substructures and the early history of the Milky Way (2002.04340v2)

Abstract: The advent of Gaia's 2nd data release in combination with large spectroscopic surveys are revolutionizing our understanding of the Galaxy. Thanks to these and the knowledge accumulated thus far, a more mature picture of the evolution of the early Milky Way is emerging: * Two of the traditional Galactic components, i.e. the stellar halo and the thick disk, appear to be intimately linked: stars with halo-like kinematics originate in similar proportions, from a "heated" (thick) disk and from debris from a system named Gaia-Enceladus. Gaia-Enceladus was the last big merger event experienced by the Milky Way and probably completed around 10 Gyr ago. The puffed-up stars now present in the halo as a consequence of the merger have thus exposed the existence of a disk component at z ~ 1.8. * The Helmi streams, Sequoia, and Thamnos are amongst the newly uncovered or better characterized merger events. Knowledge of their progenitor's properties, star formation and chemical histories is still incomplete. * Debris' from different objects often overlap in phase-space. A task for the next years will be to use spectroscopic surveys for chemical labelling and to disentangle events from one another using dimensions other than only phase-space, metallicity or [alpha/Fe]. * These surveys will also provide line-of-sight velocities missing for faint stars and more accurate distance determinations for distant objects. The resulting samples of stars will cover a much wider volume of the Galaxy allowing, for example, linking kinematic substructures in the inner halo to spatial overdensities in the outer halo. * All the results obtained so far are in-line with expectations of current cosmological models. Yet, tailored hydrodynamical simulations as well as "constrained" cosmological simulations are needed to push our knowledge of the assembly of the Milky Way back to the earliest times. [abridged]