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arXiv · 2607.21937

The disrupted chemical enrichment history of the Milky Way driven by gas accretion

Jianhui Lian·Qinhao Shao·Min Du·Hanyuan Zhang·Xinxin Duan·Xin Wang·Zheng Zheng
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Abstract

As the only galaxy enabling temporally-resolved observations from an internal vantage point, the Milky Way as a galaxy offers unique insights into galactic chemical enrichment history, establishment of fundamental scaling relations, and the underlying astrophysical processes. However, this insider perspective also introduces strong selection effects, hindering direct measurement of the Milky Way's global properties and comparison with the broader galaxy population, for the vast majority of which only integrated properties can be measured. {Here we report our measurements of the Milky Way's temporally-resolved galaxy-scale average metallicity using data from the APOGEE survey after correction for the selection function. Our findings unveil a present-day metallicity of the Milky Way close to the Sun, an interrupted integrated age-metallicity relation, and a disturbed evolutionary trajectory in the mass-metallicity diagram, likely caused by dilution and inside-out growth associated with external gas accretion around 7~Gyr ago. Our results highlight the critical role of gas accretion in disrupting the galactic enrichment histories and introducing scatter in mass-metallicity relations.

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Jianhui Lian, Qinhao Shao, Min Du, Hanyuan Zhang, Xinxin Duan, Xin Wang, Zheng Zheng. 2026-07-24. The disrupted chemical enrichment history of the Milky Way driven by gas accretion. https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.21937

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