Evolution of action-space coherence in a Milky Way-like simulation

ABSTRACT Efforts to dynamically trace stars back to the now-dissolved clusters in which they formed rely implicitly on the assumption that stellar orbital actions are conserved. While this holds in a static, axisymmetric potential, it is unknown how strongly the time-varying, non-axisymmetric structure of a real galactic disc drives action drift that inhibits cluster reconstruction. We answer this question using a high-resolution magnetohydrodynamic simulation of a Milky Way-like spiral disc galaxy. We show that, while stars experience significant action evolution over ${\lesssim} 100$ Myr, they do so in a correlated fashion whereby stars born in close proximity maintain very similar actions for up to 0.5 Gyr. The degree of coherence shows no significant dependence on galactocentric radius, but varies between action components: Vertical actions decohere for stars born more than a few hundred parsecs apart (likely due to giant molecular clouds), while radial and azimuthal actions remain correlated on kiloparsec scales (likely influenced by spiral arms). We use our measurements of the rate of action decoherence to develop a probabilistic framework that lets us infer the initial sizes of the star cluster progenitors of present-day ‘disc streams’ from their measured action distributions, which we apply to 438 known moving groups. Our results suggest that most of these streams likely originated from compact clusters, but that a significant minority are instead likely to be resonant or dynamically induced structures. This method of classifying streams complements existing methods, optimizes the use of expensive spectroscopic abundance measurements, and will be enhanced by the more precise kinematic data that will soon become available from Gaia Data Release 4.