The Gaia Sausage is the major accretion event that built the stellar halo of the Milky Way galaxy. Here, we provide dynamical and chemical evidence for a second substantial accretion episode, distinct from the Gaia Sausage. The Sequoia Event provided the bulk of the high energy retrograde stars in the stellar halo, as well as the recently discovered globular cluster FSR 1758. There are up to 6 further globular clusters, including ω Centauri, as well as many of the retrograde substructures in Myeong et al. (2018), associated with the progenitor dwarf galaxy, named the Sequoia. The stellar mass in the Sequoia galaxy is ∼ 5 × 10 7 M , whilst the total mass is ∼ 10 10 M , as judged from abundance matching or from the total sum of the globular cluster mass. Although clearly less massive than the Sausage, the Sequoia has a distinct chemodynamical signature. The strongly retrograde Sequoia stars have a typical eccentricity of ∼ 0.6, whereas the Sausage stars have no clear net rotation and move on predominantly radial orbits. On average, the Sequoia stars have lower metallicity by ∼ 0.3 dex and higher abundance ratios as compared to the Sausage. We conjecture that the Sausage and the Sequoia galaxies may have been associated and accreted at a comparable epoch.
Agama is a publicly available software library for a broad range of applications in the field of stellar dynamics. It provides methods for computing the gravitational potential of arbitrary analytic density profiles or N -body models; orbit integration and analysis; transformations between position/velocity and action/angle variables; distribution functions expressed in terms of actions and their moments; iterative construction of self-consistent multicomponent galaxy models. Applications include the inference about the structure of Milky Way or other galaxies from observations of stellar kinematics; preparation of equilibrium initial conditions for N -body simulations; analysis of snapshots from simulations. The library is written in C++, provides a Python interface, and can be coupled to other stellar-dynamical software: Amuse, Galpy and Nemo. It is hosted at http://github.com/GalacticDynamics-Oxford/Agama.
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