How does the stellar disk of the Milky Way get its gas?

SCANNAPIECO, CECILIA; JUNQUEIRA, THIAGO; NUZA, SEBASTIÁN E.; MINCHEV, IVAN; CHIAPPINI, CRISTINA; MARTIG, MARIE

Potsdam

Simposio; Rediscovering our Galaxy; 2017

In chemodynamical evolution models it is usually assumed that the MilkyWay galaxy forms from the inside-out implying that gas inflows onto thedisk decrease with galactocentric distance. Similarly, to reproducedifferences between chemical abundances of the thick disk and bulge withrespect to those of the thin disk, higher accretion fluxes at earlytimes are postulated. By using a suite of Milky Way-like galaxiesextracted from cosmological simulations, we investigate the accretion ofgas on the simulated stellar disks during their whole evolution. Ingeneral, we find that the picture outlined above holds, although thedetailed behavior depends on the assembly history of the Galaxy and thecomplexities inherent to the physics of galaxy formation.