PROBING THE HALO FROM THE SOLAR VICINITY TO THE OUTER GALAXY: CONNECTING STARS IN LOCAL VELOCITY STRUCTURES TO LARGE-SCALE CLOUDS

This paper presents the first potential connections made between two local features in velocity space found in a survey of M giant stars and stellar spatial inhomogeneities on global scales. Comparison to cosmological, chemodynamical stellar halo models confirms that the M giant population is particularly sensitive to rare, recent and massive accretion events. These events can give rise to locally observed velocity sequences-each made from a small fraction of debris from a massive progenitor, passing at high velocity through the survey volume, near the pericenter of the eccentric orbit of the system. The majority of the debris is found in much larger structures, whose morphologies are more cloud-like than stream-like and which lie at the orbital apocenters. Adopting this interpretation, the full-space motions represented by the observed M giant velocity features are derived under the assumption that the members within each sequence share a common space velocity. Orbit integrations are then used to trace the past and future trajectories of these stars across the sky revealing plausible associations with large, previously discovered, cloud-like structures. The connections made between nearby velocity structures and these distant clouds represent preliminary steps toward developing coherent maps of such giant debris systems. These maps promise to provide new insights into the origin of debris clouds, new probes of Galactic history and structure, and new constraints on the high-velocity tails of the local dark matter distribution that are essential for interpreting direct dark matter particle detection experiments.