arXiv subjects

Paula Jofré

Publications and source records attributed to Paula Jofré.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Comparing phylogenetic trees of stars with spectral graph distances

Phylogenetic trees offer a hierarchical representation of chemical similarities among stars, from which their evolutionary histories can, in principle, be reconstructed. Simulation-based work suggests that phylogenetic trees built under different chemical evolution scenarios carry distinguishable structural imprints, but whether existing methods can detect this signal in practice is unclear. We evaluate distance measures, both classical tree-based and graph-theoretical, for comparing phylogenetic trees, seeking measures robust to observational noise that separate trees built from populations with distinct chemical enrichment histories. We construct Neighbor-Joining trees from chemical abundance vectors of solar twins and of stars associated with the Milky Way (MW) disk, Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus (GSE), and the Sagittarius dwarf spheroidal galaxy (Sgr). Two benchmark tests assess stability under input perturbations within the same evolutionary history and discriminative power between distinct stellar populations used as proxies for different evolutionary histories. Tree metrics rapidly saturate under perturbations of order the typical uncertainty ($\approx2σ$, or $\approx0.05$ dex per element) and fail to distinguish trees when leaf sets differ. In contrast, spectral distances vary smoothly with perturbation amplitude and provide a label-invariant method for comparing trees built from disjoint sets of stars. Among the spectral measures evaluated, the Laplacian spectral distance shows the most consistent separation across population pairs, while the normalized variant is weakest. Applied to MW, GSE, and Sgr stars, spectral measures recover a distance ordering consistent with their known chemical enrichment histories. This framework also provides a route to comparing observed enrichment histories against simulations to identify those that best reproduce the observed tree structure.

astro-ph.GA↗

arXiv2026

Evidence for elemental diffusion in the eclipsing binary star AI Phoenicis

AI Phe is an eclipsing binary star with an orbital period of 24.6 days for which the surface gravity and effective temperature are known from direct measurements to very high precision and accuracy. We have obtained high-quality spectroscopy of the K0IV star during the total eclipse of the F7V companion, and also obtained spectra with a very high signal-to-noise ratio for this star and its F7V companion using the spectral disentangling technique. We have used these spectra to measure the abundances of iron and magnesium for both stars. We compare the values of [Fe/H] and [Mg/H] for the F7V star and the K0IV star to stars in M67, an open cluster of similar age and metallicity to AI Phe. We find that our [Fe/H] and [Mg/H] measurements clearly show the signature of elemental diffusion in the F7V star. This suggests that AI Phe can be used to test models of single stars that include diffusion and mixing of elements.

astro-ph.SR↗

arXiv2026

Reconstructing chemical enrichment pathways in disc galaxies: A phylogenetic approach

Phylogenetic methods, traditionally used in biology to trace the evolutionary relationships among species, are emerging as a powerful framework to reconstruct evolutionary processes in galaxies from chemical information. We apply galactic phylogenetics to study the chemical evolution of stellar populations in distinct regions of a simulated disc galaxy, assessing its capability to unveil assembly histories. We used a high-resolution simulation that follows the chemical enrichment of an isolated disc galaxy, by different stellar progenitors. We track gas particles as they turn into stars and inherit their parent gas chemical composition. Target particles are selected to store the chemical history of each chemical element considered in the simulation. Two regions were analysed: an inner ring, influenced by early bar-driven inflows, and an outer ring, shaped by spiral arms. We built phylogenetic trees for stellar populations in each region and quantified their structure using the Corrected Colless index, a standard metric of tree balance used in biology. The inner ring tree reveals a compact clade of old stars enriched by rapid SNII feedback, followed by a hierarchical sequence with increasing SNIa and AGB contributions. In contrast, the outer ring exhibits more symmetric, caterpillar-like trees with smoother abundance gradients, consistent with more prolonged star formation and efficient local mixing. Chemical enrichment rates corroborate these trends, showing fast early enrichment in the inner ring and gradual, spatially extended enrichment in the outer disc. The structural indices differ significantly between the two regions and converge robustly even for modest stellar samples (NSSP = 100). Galactic phylogenetics provides a novel and complementary tool to decode the fossil record of galaxies.

astro-ph.GA↗

arXiv2026

Disentangling chemical evolution histories with phylogenetic trees

Chemical abundances encode the fossil record of galaxy evolution in a complex and diverse way that requires innovative approaches to reconstruct galactic histories. We investigate the power of using phylogenetic methods to disentangle different evolutionary pathways in analytical chemical evolution models. We ran 1024 one-zone chemical evolution models using flexCE. The resulting chemical abundances are combined with those of two fiducial models, mw-fid and dw-fid, and then used both to determine which combinations produce two-branched phylogenetic trees, as well as how purely these trees split the two input models. We used random forests and Shapley analysis to predict which model combinations return well-separated trees and explain which input parameters are most important for this. We also studied the abundance patterns, as well as star formation rates, mass accumulation, and branch lengths. We found that η, the mass-loading outflow parameter in flexCE, had the largest impact in separating models into separate branches, due to its importance in driving the chemical enrichment rates and total abundances. Star formation rates and mass accumulation had some impact on η, but no direct relation between these quantities and the abundances was found. We also found that branches connected through the most metal rich tips in our trees, which is opposite to how phylogenetic trees connect in biological systems. Phylogenetic trees help to reconstruct histories when there is information that is inherited between generations, which is the case of the chemical elements in galaxy evolution. Branch topologies can provide information about the rates of evolutionary change of the various populations, and the connection between branches also contains information about their shared history. This work brings us a step further understanding galaxy evolution through cross-disciplinary research.

astro-ph.GA↗

arXiv2026

Gaia FGK Benchmark Stars: Impact of Spectral Resolution on Stellar Abundances

In the era of large Milky Way spectroscopic surveys, calibrating and standardizing stellar parameters and abundance measurements is crucial. The Gaia benchmark stars (GBS) are key references points characterized by well-defined parameters derived from fundamental relations independent of spectroscopy. We analyze 30 GBS with spectra data at three different resolutions. Our goal is to evaluate the impact of spectral resolution on the measurements of the stellar parameters and chemical abundances. We also present a line selection suitable for both metal-poor and metal-rich stars. We used R~190000 (R190), R~42000 (R42), R~28 000 (R28), and R190 degraded to R28 (R190-R28) spectral data to measure abundances with synthetic fitting and equivalent widths (EW) methods, testing the needed resolution to obtain consistent results. Our comparative analysis between R28 and R190-R28 shows that gaps in wavelength coverage can lead to discrepancies in the derived stellar parameters, particularly log g. These effects are not primarily driven by resolution, but rather by the limited spectral coverage and line availability. We find overall similar abundance, emphasizing the importance of line selection for spectroscopic studies. However, some elements (e.g, Ti II, Sc II) show larger discrepancies, possibly due to blending that becomes more pronounced as resolution decreases or is HFS-sensitive. Our comparative analysis shows that the abundances for Fe I, Ni I, Ti I, and Si I present less scatter across all resolutions, including R28. Our findings indicate that for some elements, synthetic fitting and the EW method give similar abundances, especially at the highest resolution. However, we also find that the highest resolution is not always essential for chemical abundance measurements. Our results provide practical guidelines for upcoming large surveys to reconstruct the chemical history of the Milky Way.

astro-ph.SR↗

arXiv2026

Gaia FGK Benchmark Stars: Selecting Infrared Lines for Abundance Determination

The advent of new and more powerful infrared spectrographs has significantly motivated the advancement of the study of atomic and molecular line lists and stellar atmosphere models. While optical abundance determinations rely on extensively validated line lists and modeling frameworks, infrared measurements still face larger uncertainties, largely driven by the choice of atmospheric models and the quality of the available atomic data. In this work, we aim to deliver a homogeneous and reproducible set of atomic absorption lines in the Y, J, and H bands (9800 - 18000 (Angstrom)), based exclusively on laboratory atomic data. We analyse CRIRES spectra of six Gaia FGK Benchmark Stars spanning a wide range in effective temperature, surface gravity, and chemical composition. Synthetic spectra are computed using the benchmark stellar parameters, and each transition is evaluated independently in every star through a quantitative sequence that examines line depth, saturation, blending (purity), and the agreement between observed and synthetic line profiles. We identify a set of robust atomic transitions in these bands that remain consistent across the full range of stellar parameters represented in our sample. Lines of alpha-elements such as Mg I, Si I, and Ca I, together with several Fe I transitions, satisfy all robustness criteria. Among the neutron-capture species explored, only Sr II provides lines that consistently meet our requirements. Beyond the specific list of accepted transitions, this study demonstrates that a fully quantitative, multi-criteria framework provides a transparent and reproducible foundation for near-infrared line validation as laboratory data, stellar atmosphere models, and instrumentation continue to improve.

astro-ph.SR↗

arXiv2025

Towards model-free stellar chemical abundances. Potential applications in the search for chemically peculiar stars in large spectroscopic surveys

Chemical abundance determinations from stellar spectra are challenged by observational noise, limitations in stellar models, and departures from simplifying assumptions. While traditional and supervised machine learning methods have made remarkable progress in estimating atmospheric parameters and chemical compositions within existing physical models, these factors still constrain our ability to fully exploit the vast data sets provided by modern spectroscopic surveys. We aim to develop a self-supervised, disentangled representation learning framework that extracts chemically meaningful features directly from spectra, without relying on externally imposed label catalogs. We build a variational autoencoder-based representation learning model with physics-inspired structure: multiple decoders each focus on spectral regions dominated by a particular element, enforcing that each latent dimension maps to a single abundance. To evaluate the potential application of our framework, we trained and validated the model on low-resolution, low signal-to-noise synthetic spectra focusing on $\rm [Fe/H]$, $\rm [C/Fe]$, and $\rm [α/Fe]$. We then demonstrate how the trained model can be used to flag stars as chemically enhanced or depleted in these abundances based on their position within the latent distribution. Our model successfully learns a representation of spectra whose axes correlate tightly with the target abundances ($r=0.92\pm0.01$ for $\rm [Fe/H]$, $r=0.92\pm0.01$ for $\rm [C/Fe]$, $r=0.82\pm0.02$ for $\rm [α/Fe]$). The disentangled representations provide a robust means to distinguish stars based on their chemical properties, offering an efficient and scalable solution for large spectroscopic surveys.

astro-ph.SR↗

arXiv2025

SDSS-V Milky Way Mapper (MWM): ASPCAP Stellar Parameters and Abundances in SDSS-V Data Release 19

The goal of this paper is to describe the science verification of Milky Way Mapper (MWM) APOGEE Stellar Parameter and Chemical Abundances Pipeline (ASPCAP) data products published in Data Release 19 (DR19) of the fifth phase of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-V). We compare MWM ASPCAP atmospheric parameters T$_{\rm eff}$, log g, 24 abundances of 21 elements (carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen have multiple sources for deriving their abundance values) and their uncertainties determined from Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment (APOGEE) spectrograph spectra with those of the literature and evaluate their accuracy and precision. We also test the zero-point calibration of the v$_{\rm rad}$ derived by the APOGEE Data Reduction Pipeline. This data release contains ASPCAP parameters for 964,989 stars, including all APOGEE-2 targets expanded with new observations of 336,511 stars from the Apache Point Observatory observed until 4 July 2023. Overall, the new T$_{\rm eff}$ values show excellent agreement with the IRFM scale, while the surface gravities exhibit slight systematic offsets compared to asteroseisimic gravities. The estimated precision of T$_{\rm eff}$ is between 50 and 70 K for giants and 70$-$100 K for dwarfs, while surface gravities are measured with a precision of 0.07$-$0.09 dex for giants. We achieve an estimated precision of 0.02$-$0.04 dex for multiple elements, including metallicity, $α$, Mg, and Si, while the precision of at least 10 elements is better than 0.1 dex.

astro-ph.SR↗

arXiv2025

The Pristine Inner Galaxy Survey (PIGS) XI: Revealing the chemical evolution of the interacting Sagittarius dwarf galaxy

The Sagittarius dwarf spheroidal galaxy (Sgr dSph) is a satellite orbiting the Milky Way that has experienced multiple stripping events due to tidal interactions with our Galaxy. Its accretion history led to a distinct stellar overdensity, the remnant of the core of the progenitor. We present a complete chemical analysis of 111 giant stars in the core of Sgr to investigate the chemical evolution and enrichment history of this satellite. Employing the metallicity-sensitive Ca H&K photometry from the Pristine Inner Galaxy Survey, we selected stars that span a wide metallicity range and obtained high-resolution spectra with the ESO FLAMES/GIRAFFE multiobject spectrograph. For the stellar sample covering $-2.13 < \rm{[Fe/H] < -0.35}$, we derived abundances for up to 14 chemical elements with average uncertainties of $\sim 0.09$ dex and a set of stellar ages that allowed us to build an age-metallicity relation (AMR) for the entire sample. With the most comprehensive set of chemical species measured for the core of Sgr (Na, Mg, Al, Si, Ca, Sc, Ti, V, Cr, Co, Ba, La, and Eu), we studied several [X/Fe] ratios. Most trends align with Galactic chemical trends, but notable differences emerge in the heavy $n$-capture elements, which offer independent insights into the star formation history of a stellar population. The deficiency in $α$ elements relative to the Milky Way suggests a slower, less efficient early star formation history, similar to other massive satellites. $S$-process element patterns indicate significant enrichment from asymptotic giant branch stars over time. The AMR and chemical ratios point to an extended star formation history, with a rapid early phase in the first Gyr, followed by declining activity and later star-forming episodes. These findings are consistent with Sgr hosting multiple stellar populations, from young ($\sim 4$ Gyr) to old, metal-poor stars ($\sim 10$ Gyr).

astro-ph.GA↗

arXiv2024

Host-star and exoplanet composition: Polluted white dwarf reveals depletion of moderately refractory elements in planetary material

Planets form from the same cloud of molecular gas and dust as their host stars. Confirming if planetary bodies acquire the same refractory element composition as their natal disc during formation, and how efficiently volatile elements are incorporated into growing planets, is key to linking the poorly constrained interior composition of rocky exoplanets to the observationally-constrained composition of their host star. Such comparisons also afford insight into the planet formation process. This work compares planetary composition with host-star composition using observations of a white dwarf that has accreted planetary material and its F-type star wide binary companion as a reference for the composition of the natal molecular gas and dust. Spectroscopic analysis reveals abundances of Fe, Mg, Si, Ca, and Ti in both stars. We use the white dwarf measurements to estimate the composition of the exoplanetary material and the F-type companion to constrain the composition of the material the planet formed from. Comparing planetary material to the composition of its natal cloud, our results reveal that the planetary material is depleted in moderate refractories (Mg, Si, Fe) relative to the refractory material (Ca, Ti). Grouping elements based on their condensation temperatures is key to linking stellar and planetary compositions. Fractionation during formation or subsequent planetary evolution leads to the depletion of moderate refractories from the planetary material accreted by the white dwarf. This signature, as seen for bulk Earth, will likely be present in the composition of many exoplanets relative to their host-stars.

astro-ph.SR↗

arXiv2024

Full abundance study of two newly discovered barium giants

Barium (Ba) stars are chemically peculiar stars that show enhanced surface abundances of heavy elements produced by the slow-neutron-capture process, the so-called s-process. These stars are not sufficiently evolved to undergo the s-process in their interiors, so they are considered products of binary interactions. Ba stars form when a former Asymptotic Giant Branch (AGB) companion, which is now a white dwarf, pollutes them with s-process-rich material through mass transfer. This paper presents a detailed chemical characterization of two newly discovered Ba giants. Our main goal is to confirm their status as extrinsic s-process stars and explore potential binarity and white dwarf companions. We obtained high-resolution spectra with UVES on the Very Large Telescope to determine the chemical properties of the targets. We perform line-by-line analyses and measure 22 elements with an internal precision up to 0.04 dex. The binary nature of the targets is investigated through radial velocity variability and spectral energy distribution fitting. We found that both targets are enhanced in all the measured s-process elements, classifying our targets as Ba giants. This is the first time they are classified as such in the literature. Additionally, both stars present a mild enhancement in Eu, but less than in pure s-process elements, suggesting that the sources that polluted them were pure s-process sources. Finally, we confirmed that the two targets are RV variable and likely binary systems. The abundances in these two newly discovered polluted binaries align with classical Ba giants, providing observational constraints to better understand the s-process in AGB stars.

astro-ph.SR↗

arXiv2024

The Chemical Diversity of the Metal-Poor Milky Way

We present a detailed study of the chemical diversity of the metal-poor Milky Way (MW) using data from the GALAH DR3 survey. Considering 17 chemical abundances relative to iron ([X/Fe]) for 9,923 stars, we employ Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Extreme Deconvolution (XD) to identify 10 distinct stellar groups. This approach, free from chemical or dynamical cuts, reveals known populations, including the accreted halo, thick disc, thin disc, and in-situ halo. The thick disc is characterised by multiple substructures, suggesting it comprises stars formed in diverse environments. Our findings highlight the limited discriminatory power of magnesium in separating accreted and disc stars. Elements such as Ba, Al, Cu, and Sc are critical in distinguishing disc from accreted stars, while Ba, Y, Eu and Zn differentiate disc and accreted stars from the in-situ halo. This study demonstrates the potential power of combining a latent space representation of the data (PCA) with a clustering algorithm (XD) in Galactic archaeology, in providing new insights into the galaxy's assembly and evolutionary history.

astro-ph.GA↗

arXiv2024

The accreted Galaxy: An overview of TESS metal-poor accreted stars candidates

The Milky Way is a mosaic of stars from different origins. In particular, metal-poor accreted star candidates offer a unique opportunity to better understand the accretion history of the Milky Way. In this work, we aim to explore the assembly history of the Milky Way by investigating accreted stars in terms of their ages, dynamical properties, and chemical abundances. We also aim to better characterize the impact of incorporating asteroseismic information on age and chemical abundance calculations of metal-poor accreted stars for which TESS data is available. In this study, we conducted an in-depth examination of 30 metal-poor accreted star candidates, using TESS and Gaia data, as well as MIKE spectra. We find satisfactory agreement between seismic and predicted/spectroscopic surface gravity (log g) values, demonstrating the reliability of spectroscopic data from our methodology. We found that while age determination is highly dependent on the log g and asteroseismic information used, the overall chemical abundance distributions are similar for different log g. However, we found that calcium (Ca) abundances are more sensitive to the adopted log g. Our study reveals that the majority of our stars have properties compatible to those reported for the Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus, with a minority of stars that might be associated to Splash. We found an age distribution with a median of 11.3 Gyr with lower and upper uncertainties of 4.1 and 1.3 Gyr respectively when including asteroseismic information. As regarding some key chemical signatures we note that these stars are metal-poor ([Fe/H]) < -0.8), alpha-rich ([alpha]/Fe] > 0.2), copper-poor ([Cu/Fe] < 0 ) and with chemical abundances typical of accreted stars. These findings illustrate the importance of multi-dimensional analyses in unraveling the complex accretion history of the Milky Way.

astro-ph.GA↗

arXiv2024

A baseline on the relation between chemical patterns and birth stellar cluster

The chemical composition of a star's atmosphere reflects the chemical composition of its birth environment. Therefore, it should be feasible to recognize stars born together that have scattered throughout the galaxy, solely based on their chemistry. This concept, known as "strong chemical tagging", is a major objective of spectroscopic studies, but has yet to yield the anticipated results. We assess the existence and the robustness of the relation between chemical abundances and birth place using known member stars of open clusters. We followed a supervised machine learning approach, using chemical abundances obtained from APOGEE DR17, observed open clusters as labels and different data preprocessing techniques. We found that open clusters can be recovered with any classifier and on data whose features are not carefully selected. In the sample with no field stars, we obtain an average accuracy of $75.2\%$ and we find that the prediction accuracy depends mostly on the uncertainties of the chemical abundances. When field stars outnumber the cluster members, the performance degrades. Our results show the difficulty of recovering birth clusters using chemistry alone, even in a supervised scenario. This clearly challenges the feasibility of strong chemical tagging. Nevertheless, including information about ages could potentially enhance the possibility of recovering birth clusters.

astro-ph.GA↗

arXiv2024

Assembling a high-precision abundance catalogue of solar twins in GALAH for phylogenetic studies

Stellar chemical abundances have proved themselves a key source of information for understanding the evolution of the Milky Way, and the scale of major stellar surveys such as GALAH have massively increased the amount of chemical data available. However, progress is hampered by the level of precision in chemical abundance data as well as the visualization methods for comparing the multidimensional outputs of chemical evolution models to stellar abundance data. Machine learning methods have greatly improved the former; while the application of tree-building or phylogenetic methods borrowed from biology are beginning to show promise with the latter. Here we analyse a sample of GALAH solar twins to address these issues. We apply The Cannon algorithm to generate a catalogue of about 40,000 solar twins with 14 high precision abundances which we use to perform a phylogenetic analysis on a selection of stars that have two different ranges of eccentricities. From our analyses we are able to find a group with mostly stars on circular orbits and some old stars with eccentric orbits whose age-[Y/Mg] relation agrees remarkably well with the chemical clocks published by previous high precision abundance studies. Our results show the power of combining survey data with machine learning and phylogenetics to reconstruct the history of the Milky Way.

astro-ph.GA↗

arXiv2023

On the evolutionary history of a simulated disc galaxy as seen by phylogenetic trees

Phylogenetic methods have long been used in biology, and more recently have been extended to other fields - for example, linguistics and technology - to study evolutionary histories. Galaxies also have an evolutionary history, and fall within this broad phylogenetic framework. Under the hypothesis that chemical abundances can be used as a proxy for interstellar medium's DNA, phylogenetic methods allow us to reconstruct hierarchical similarities and differences among stars - essentially a tree of evolutionary relationships and thus history. In this work, we apply phylogenetic methods to a simulated disc galaxy obtained with a chemo-dynamical code to test the approach. We found that at least 100 stellar particles are required to reliably portray the evolutionary history of a selected stellar population in this simulation, and that the overall evolutionary history is reliably preserved when the typical uncertainties in the chemical abundances are smaller than 0.08 dex. The results show that the shape of the trees are strongly affected by the age-metallicity relation, as well as the star formation history of the galaxy. We found that regions with low star formation rates produce shorter trees than regions with high star formation rates. Our analysis demonstrates that phylogenetic methods can shed light on the process of galaxy evolution.

astro-ph.GA↗

arXiv2022

Comparative analysis of atmospheric parameters from high-resolution spectroscopic sky surveys: APOGEE, GALAH, Gaia-ESO

SDSS-IV APOGEE-2, GALAH and Gaia-ESO are high resolution, ground-based, multi-object spectroscopic surveys providing fundamental stellar atmospheric parameters and multiple elemental abundance ratios for hundreds of thousands of stars of the Milky Way. We undertake a comparison between the most recent data releases of these surveys to investigate the accuracy and precision of derived parameters by placing the abundances on an absolute scale. We discuss the correlations in parameter and abundance differences as a function of main parameters. Uncovering the variants provides a basis to on-going efforts of future sky surveys. Quality samples from the APOGEE-GALAH, APOGEE-GES and GALAH-GES overlapping catalogs are collected. We investigate the mean variants between the surveys, and linear trends are also investigated. We compare the slope of correlations and mean differences with the reported uncertainties. The average and scatter of vrad, Teff, log g, [M/H] and vmicro, along with numerous species of elemental abundances in the combined catalogs show that in general there is a good agreement between the surveys. We find large radial velocity scatters ranging from 1.3 km/s to 4.4 km/s when comparing the three surveys. We observe weak trends: e.g. in $Δ$Teff vs. $Δ$log g for the APOGEE-GES stars, and a clear correlation in the vmicro-$Δ$vmicro planes in the APOGEE-GALAH common sample. For [$α$/H], [Ti/H] (APOGEE-GALAH giants) and [Al/H] (APOGEE-GALAH dwarfs) potential strong correlations are discovered as a function of the differences in the main atmospheric parameters, and we find weak trends for other elements. In general we find good agreement between the three surveys within their respective uncertainties. However, there are certain regimes in which strong variants exist, which we discuss. There are still offsets larger than 0.1 dex in the absolute abundance scales.

astro-ph.SR↗

arXiv2022

The Pristine Inner Galaxy Survey (PIGS) IV: A photometric metallicity analysis of the Sagittarius dwarf spheroidal galaxy

We present a comprehensive metallicity analysis of the Sagittarius dwarf spheroidal galaxy (Sgr dSph) using $Pristine\,CaHK$ photometry. We base our member selection on $Gaia$ EDR3 astrometry applying a magnitude limit at $G_{0} = 17.3$, and our population study on the metallicity-sensitive photometry from the $Pristine$ Inner Galaxy Survey (PIGS). Working with photometric metallicities instead of spectroscopic metallicities allows us to cover an unprecedented large area ($\sim 100$ square degrees) of the dwarf galaxy, and to study the spatial distribution of its members as function of metallicity with little selection effects. Our study compares the spatial distributions of a metal-poor population of 9719 stars with [Fe/H] $< -1.3$ and a metal rich one of 30115 stars with [Fe/H] $> -1.0$. The photometric Sgr sample also allows us to assemble the largest sample of 1150 very metal-poor Sgr candidates ([Fe/H] $< -2.0$). By investigating and fitting the spatial properties of the metal-rich and metal-poor population, we find a negative metallicity gradient which extends up to 12 degrees from the Sgr center (or $\sim 5.5$ kpc at the distance of Sgr), the limit of our footprint. We conclude that the relative number of metal-poor stars increases in the outer areas of the galaxy, while the central region is dominated by metal-rich stars. These finding suggest an outside-in formation process and are an indication of the extended formation history of Sgr, which has been affected by the tidal interaction between Sgr and the Milky Way.

astro-ph.GA↗