Abstract

Buckley
Disentangling Accreted Systems in the Milky Way's Stellar Halo using Extreme Deconvolution
Understanding the complex nature of the Milky Way's stellar halo is crucial for unraveling the history of galactic assembly. In this study, we employ robust chemical hyperplanes and Extreme Deconvolution (XD) to disentangle these substructures. XD, a Gaussian mixture method, adeptly recovers population distributions even in the presence of noise and biases. Leveraging the extensive chemodynamical data provided by GALAH DR3, we focus on breaking down the chemical degeneracy within the stellar halo while minimising contamination from disk stars. To achieve this, we incorporate a diverse range of nucleosynthesis sites and apply variable transformations to mitigate underlying chemical blurring due to systematic effects. Notably, Principal Component Analysis (PCA) reveals the significance of neutron-capture abundances, which contribute significantly (70%) to the second most informative variable. This underscores their pivotal role in accurately chemically tagging accreted substructures, shedding light on their unique enrichment histories and providing key insights into the process of galactic assembly.