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Milky Way globular clusters (GCs) display chemical enrichment in a phenomenon called multiple stellar populations (MSPs). While the enrichment mechanism is not fully understood, there is a correlation between a cluster's mass and the fraction of enriched stars found therein. However, present-day GC masses are often smaller than their masses at the time of formation due to dynamical mass-loss. In this work, we explore the relationship between mass and MSPs using the stellar stream 300S. We present the chemical abundances of eight red giant branch member stars in 300S with high-resolution spectroscopy from Magellan/MIKE. We identify one enriched star characteristic of MSPs and no detectable metallicity dispersion, confirming that the progenitor of 300S was a GC. The fraction of enriched stars (12.5 per cent) observed in our 300S stars is less than the 50 per cent of stars found enriched in Milky Way GCs of comparable present-day mass (∼104.5  |$\mathrm{\, {\rm M}_{\odot }}$|⁠). We calculate the mass of 300S's progenitor and compare it to the initial masses of intact GCs, finding that 300S aligns well with the trend between the system mass at formation and enrichment. 300S's progenitor may straddle the critical mass threshold for the formation of MSPs and can therefore serve as a benchmark for the stellar enrichment process. Additionally, we identify a CH star, with high abundances of s -process elements, probably accreted from a binary companion. The rarity of such binaries in intact GCs may imply stellar streams permit the survival of binaries that would otherwise be disrupted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a 6D map of the Orphan–Chenab (OC) stream by combining the data from Southern Stellar Stream Spectroscopic Survey (S 5) and Gaia. We reconstruct the proper motion, radial velocity, distance, on-sky track, and stellar density along the stream with spline models. The stream has a total luminosity of MV  = −8.2 and metallicity of [Fe/H] = −1.9, similar to classical Milky Way (MW) satellites like Draco. The stream shows drastic changes in its physical width varying from 200 pc to 1 kpc, but a constant line-of-sight velocity dispersion of 5 |$\mathrm{km\, s^{-1}}$|⁠. Despite the large apparent variation in the stellar number density along the stream, the flow rate of stars along the stream is remarkably constant. We model the 6D stream track by a Lagrange-point stripping method with a flexible MW potential in the presence of a moving extended Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). This allows us to constrain the mass profile of the MW within the distance range 15.6 <  r  < 55.5 kpc, with the best measured enclosed mass of |$(2.85\pm 0.1)\times 10^{11}\, \mathrm{\, M_\odot }$| within 32.4 kpc. Our stream measurements are highly sensitive to the LMC mass profile with the most precise measurement of its enclosed mass made at 32.8 kpc, |$(7.02\pm 0.9)\times 10^{10}\, {\rm M}_\odot$|⁠. We also detect that the LMC dark matter halo extends to at least 53 kpc. The fitting of the OC stream allows us to constrain the past LMC trajectory and the degree of dynamical friction it experienced. We demonstrate that the stars in the OC stream show large energy and angular momentum spreads caused by LMC perturbation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of solar twins have key impacts on the astronomical community, but only ∼100–200 nearby solar twins (<1 kpc) have been reliably identified over the last few decades. The aim of our survey (SDST) is to identify ∼150–200 distant solar twins and analogues (up to ≲4 kpc) closer to the Galactic Centre. We took advantage of the precise Gaia and Skymapper surveys to select Sun-like candidates in a 2-deg field, which were observed with the HERMES spectrograph on the Anglo-Australian Telescope. We successfully built up the required signal-to-noise ratio (25-per-pixel in the HERMES red band) for most targets as faint as Gaia G of 17.4 mag. The stellar photometric/astrometric parameters (e.g. T eff, log  g , mass) of our candidates are derived in this paper, while the spectroscopic parameters will be presented in the third paper in this SDST series. The selection success rate – the fraction of targets which belong to solar twins or analogues – was estimated from simulated survey data and the Besançon stellar population model, and compared with the actual success rate of the survey. We find that expected and actual success rates agree well, indicating that the numbers of solar twins and analogues we discover in SDST are consistent with expectations, affirming the survey approach. These distant solar analogues are prime targets for testing for any variation in the strength of electromagnetism in regions of higher dark matter density, and can make additional contributions to our understanding of, e.g. Galactic chemical evolution in the inner Milky Way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present the first large-scale study that demonstrates how ages can be determined for large samples of stars through Galactic chemical evolution. Previous studies found that the elemental abundances of a star correlate directly with its age and metallicity. Using this knowledge, we derive ages for 214 577 stars in GALAH DR3 using only overall metallicities and chemical abundances. Stellar ages are estimated via the machine learning algorithm XGBoost for stars belonging to the Milky Way disc with metallicities in the range −1 < [Fe/H] < 0.5, using main-sequence turn-off stars as our training set. We find that stellar ages for the bulk of GALAH DR3 are precise to 1–2 Gyr using this method. With these ages, we replicate many recent results on the age-kinematic trends of the nearby disc, including the solar neighbourhood's age–velocity dispersion relationship and the larger global velocity dispersion relations of the disc found using Gaia and GALAH. These results show that chemical abundance variations at a given birth radius are small, and that strong chemical tagging of stars directly to birth clusters may prove difficult with our current elemental abundance precision. Our results highlight the need to measure abundances for as many nucleosynthetic production sites as possible in order to estimate reliable ages from chemistry. Our methods open a new door into studies of the kinematic structure and evolution of the disc, as ages may potentially be estimated to a precision of 1–2 Gyr for a large fraction of stars in existing spectroscopic surveys. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

APOGEE and GALAH are two high resolution multi-object spectroscopic surveys that provide fundamental stellar parameters and multiple elemental abundance estimates for about half a million stars in the Milky Way. Both surveys observe in different wavelength regimes and use different data reduction pipelines leading to significant offsets and trends in stellar parameters and abundances for the common stars observed in both surveys. Such systematic differences/offsets in stellar parameters and abundances make it difficult to effectively utilize them to investigate Galactic abundance trends in spite of the unique advantage provided by their complementary sky coverage and different Milky Way components they observe. Hence, we use the Cannon data-driven method selecting a training set of 4418 common stars observed by both surveys. This enables the construction of two catalogues, one with the APOGEE-scaled and the other with the GALAH-scaled stellar parameters. Using repeat observations in APOGEE and GALAH, we find high precision in metallicity (∼0.02–0.4 dex) and alpha abundances (∼0.02–0.03 dex) for spectra with good signal-to-noise ratio (SNR > 80 for APOGEE and SNR > 40 for GALAH). We use open and globular clusters to validate our parameter estimates and find small scatter in metallicity (0.06 dex) and alpha abundances (0.03 dex) in APOGEE-scaled case. The final catalogues have been cross-matched with the Gaia EDR3 catalogue to enable their use to carry out detailed chemo-dynamic studies of the Milky Way from perspectives of APOGEE and GALAH. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extremely metal-poor (EMP) stars provide a valuable probe of early chemical enrichment in the Milky Way. Here we leverage a large sample of ∼600,000 high-resolution stellar spectra from the GALAH survey plus a machine-learning algorithm to find 54 candidates with estimated [Fe/H] ≤âˆ'3.0, six of which have [Fe/H] ≤âˆ'3.5. Our sample includes ∼20% main-sequence EMP candidates, unusually high for EMP star surveys. We find the magnitude-limited metallicity distribution function of our sample is consistent with previous work that used more complex selection criteria. The method we present has significant potential for application to the next generation of massive stellar spectroscopic surveys, which will expand the available spectroscopic data well into the millions of stars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European Space Agency (ESA) Gaia mission has enabled the remarkable discovery that a large fraction of the stars near the solar neighbourhood are debris from a single in-falling system, the so-called Gaia -Sausage-Enceladus (GSE). This discovery provides astronomers for the first time with a large cohort of easily observable, unevolved stars that formed in a single extragalactic environment. Here we use these stars to investigate the 'Spite plateau' – the near-constant lithium abundance observed in unevolved metal-poor stars across a wide range of metallicities (−3 < [Fe/H] < −1). Our aim is to test whether individual galaxies could have different Spite plateaus – e.g. the interstellar medium could be more depleted in lithium in a lower galactic mass system due to it having a smaller reservoir of gas. We identified 93 GSE dwarf stars observed and analysed by the GALactic Archaeology with HERMES (GALAH) survey as part of its Data Release 3 (DR3). Orbital actions were used to select samples of GSE stars, and comparison samples of halo and disc stars. We find that the GSE stars show the same lithium abundance as other likely accreted stars and in situ Milky Way stars. Formation environment leaves no imprint on lithium abundances. This result fits within the growing consensus that the Spite plateau, and more generally the 'cosmological lithium problem' – the observed discrepancy between the amount of lithium in warm, metal-poor dwarf stars in our Galaxy, and the amount of lithium predicted to have been produced by big bang nucleosynthesis – is the result of lithium depletion processes within stars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ensemble of chemical element abundance measurements for stars, along with precision distances and orbit properties, provides high-dimensional data to study the evolution of the Milky Way. With this third data release of the Galactic Archaeology with HERMES (GALAH) survey, we publish 678 423 spectra for 588 571 mostly nearby stars (81.2 per cent of stars are within <2 kpc), observed with the HERMES spectrograph at the Anglo-Australian Telescope. This release (hereafter GALAH+ DR3) includes all observations from GALAH Phase 1 (bright, main, and faint survey, 70 per cent), K2-HERMES (17 per cent), TESS-HERMES (5 per cent), and a subset of ancillary observations (8 per cent) including the bulge and >75 stellar clusters. We derive stellar parameters T eff, log  g , [Fe/H], v mic, v broad, and v rad using our modified version of the spectrum synthesis code Spectroscopy Made Easy (sme) and 1D marcs model atmospheres. We break spectroscopic degeneracies in our spectrum analysis with astrometry from Gaia  DR2 and photometry from 2MASS. We report abundance ratios [X/Fe] for 30 different elements (11 of which are based on non-LTE computations) covering five nucleosynthetic pathways. We describe validations for accuracy and precision, flagging of peculiar stars/measurements and recommendations for using our results. Our catalogue comprises 65 per cent dwarfs, 34 per cent giants, and 1 per cent other/unclassified stars. Based on unflagged chemical composition and age, we find 62 per cent young low- |$\alpha$|⁠ , 9 per cent young high- |$\alpha$|⁠ , 27 per cent old high- |$\alpha$|⁠ , and 2 per cent stars with [Fe/H] ≤ −1. Based on kinematics, 4 per cent are halo stars. Several Value-Added-Catalogues, including stellar ages and dynamics, updated after Gaia eDR3, accompany this release and allow chrono-chemodynamic analyses, as we showcase. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using kinematics from Gaia and the large elemental abundance space of the second data release of the GALAH survey, we identify two new members of the Fimbulthul stellar stream, and chemically tag them to massive, multimetallic globular cluster ω Centauri. Recent analysis of the second data release of Gaia had revealed the Fimbulthul stellar stream in the halo of the Milky Way. It had been proposed that the stream is associated with the ω Cen, but this proposition relied exclusively upon the kinematics and metallicities of the stars to make the association. In this work, we find our two new members of the stream to be metal-poor stars that are enhanced in sodium and aluminium, typical of second population globular cluster stars, but not otherwise seen in field stars. Furthermore, the stars share the s-process abundance pattern seen in ω Cen, which is rare in field stars. Apart from one star within 1.5 deg of ω Cen, we find no other stars observed by GALAH spatially near ω Cen or the Fimbulthul stream that could be kinematically and chemically linked to the cluster. Chemically tagging stars in the Fimbulthul stream to ω Cen confirms the earlier work, and further links this tidal feature in the Milky Way halo to ω Cen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present the serendipitous discovery of the fastest main-sequence hyper-velocity star (HVS) by the Southern Stellar Stream Spectroscopic Survey (S5). The star S5-HVS1 is a ∼2.35 M⊙ A-type star located at a distance of ∼9 kpc from the Sun and has a heliocentric radial velocity of 1017 ± 2.7  |$\mathrm{\, km\, s^{-1}}$| without any signature of velocity variability. The current 3D velocity of the star in the Galactic frame is 1755 ± 50  |$\mathrm{\, km\, s^{-1}}$|⁠. When integrated backwards in time, the orbit of the star points unambiguously to the Galactic Centre, implying that S5-HVS1 was kicked away from Sgr A* with a velocity of ∼1800  |$\mathrm{\, km\, s^{-1}}$| and travelled for 4.8 Myr to its current location. This is so far the only HVS confidently associated with the Galactic Centre. S5-HVS1 is also the first hyper-velocity star to provide constraints on the geometry and kinematics of the Galaxy, such as the Solar motion V y ,⊙ = 246.1 ± 5.3  |$\mathrm{\, km\, s^{-1}}$| or position R 0 = 8.12 ± 0.23 kpc. The ejection trajectory and transit time of S5-HVS1 coincide with the orbital plane and age of the annular disc of young stars at the Galactic Centre, and thus may be linked to its formation. With the S5-HVS1 ejection velocity being almost twice the velocity of other hyper-velocity stars previously associated with the Galactic Centre, we question whether they have been generated by the same mechanism or whether the ejection velocity distribution has been constant over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gaia DR2 has revealed new small-scale and large-scale patterns in the phase-space distribution of stars in the Milky Way. In cylindrical Galactic coordinates |$(R,\phi ,z)$|⁠ , ridge-like structures can be seen in the |$(R,V_\phi)$| plane and asymmetric arch-like structures in the |$(V_R,V_\phi)$| plane. We show that the ridges are also clearly present when the third dimension of the |$(R,V_\phi)$| plane is represented by |$\langle z \rangle$|⁠ , |$\langle V_z \rangle$|⁠ , |$\langle V_R \rangle$|⁠ , |$\langle$| [Fe/H] |$\rangle$|⁠ , and |$\langle [\alpha /{\rm Fe}]\rangle$|⁠. The maps suggest that stars along the ridges lie preferentially close to the Galactic mid-plane (⁠|$|z|\lt 0.2$| kpc), and have metallicity and |$\alpha$| elemental abundance similar to that of the Sun. We show that phase mixing of disrupting spiral arms can generate both the ridges and the arches. It also generates discrete groupings in orbital energy – the ridges and arches are simply surfaces of constant energy. We identify eight distinct ridges in the Gaia DR2 data: six of them have constant energy while two have constant angular momentum. Given that the signature is strongest for stars close to the plane, the presence of ridges in |$\langle z \rangle$| and |$\langle V_z \rangle$| suggests a coupling between planar and vertical directions. We demonstrate, using N-body simulations that such coupling can be generated both in isolated discs and in discs perturbed by an orbiting satellite like the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a study using the second data release of the GALAH survey of stellar parameters and elemental abundances of 15 pairs of stars identified by Oh et al. They identified these pairs as potentially co-moving pairs using proper motions and parallaxes from Gaia DR1. We find that 11 very wide (>1 pc) pairs of stars do in fact have similar Galactic orbits, while a further four claimed co-moving pairs are not truly co-orbiting. Eight of the 11 co-orbiting pairs have reliable stellar parameters and abundances, and we find that three of those are quite similar in their abundance patterns, while five have significant [Fe/H] differences. For the latter, this indicates that they could be co-orbiting because of the general dynamical coldness of the thin disc, or perhaps resonances induced by the Galaxy, rather than a shared formation site. Stars such as these, wide binaries, debris of past star formation episodes, and coincidental co-orbiters, are crucial for exploring the limits of chemical tagging in the Milky Way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

NGC 1851 is an intriguing Galactic globular cluster, with multiple stellar evolutionary sequences, light and heavy element abundance variations and indications of a surrounding stellar halo. We present the first results of a spectroscopic study of red giant stars within and outside of the tidal radius of this cluster. Our results identify nine probable new cluster members (inside the tidal radius) with heliocentric radial velocities consistent with that of NGC 1851. We also identify, based on their radial velocities, four probable extratidal cluster halo stars at distances up to ~3.1 times the tidal radius, which are supportive of previous findings that NGC 1851 is surrounded by an extended stellar halo. Proper motions were available for 12 of these 13 stars and all are consistent with that of NGC 1851. Apart from the cluster members and cluster halo stars, our observed radial velocity distribution agrees with the expected distribution from a Besancon disc/N-body stellar halo Milky Way model generated by the GALAXIA code, suggesting that no other structures at different radial velocities are present in our field. The metallicities of these stars are estimated using equivalent width measurements of the near-infrared calcium triplet absorption lines and are found, within the limitations of this method, to be consistent with that of NGC 1851. In addition we recover 110 red giant cluster members from previous studies based on their radial velocities and identify three stars with unusually high radial velocities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We explore the kinematics and orbital properties of a sample of red giants in the halo system of the Milky Way that are thought to have formed in globular clusters based on their anomalously strong UV/blue CN bands. The orbital parameters of the CN-strong halo stars are compared to those of the inner- and outer-halo populations as described by Carollo et al., and to the orbital parameters of globular clusters with well-studied Galactic orbits. The CN-strong field stars and the globular clusters both exhibit kinematics and orbital properties similar to the inner-halo population, indicating that stripped or destroyed globular clusters could be a significant source of inner-halo field stars, and suggesting that both the CN-strong stars and the majority of globular clusters are primarily associated with this population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We explore the kinematics and orbital properties of a sample of 323 very metal-poor stars in the halo system of the Milky Way, selected from the high-resolution spectroscopic follow-up studies of Aoki et al. and Yong et al. The combined sample contains a significant fraction of carbon-enhanced metal-poor (CEMP) stars (22% or 29%, depending on whether a strict or relaxed criterion is applied for this definition). Barium abundances (or upper limits) are available for the great majority of the CEMP stars, allowing for their separation into the CEMP-s and CEMP-no subclasses. A new method to assign membership to the inner- and outer-halo populations of the Milky Way is developed, making use of the integrals of motion, and applied to determine the relative fractions of CEMP stars in these two subclasses for each halo component. Although limited by small-number statistics, the data suggest that the inner halo of the Milky Way exhibits a somewhat higher relative number of CEMP-s stars than CEMP-no stars (57% versus 43%), while the outer halo possesses a clearly higher fraction of CEMP-no stars than CEMP-s stars (70% versus 30%). Although larger samples of CEMP stars with known Ba abundances are required, this result suggests that the dominant progenitors of CEMP stars in the two halo components were different; massive stars for the outer halo, and intermediate-mass stars in the case of the inner halo. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]