An observational testbed for cosmological zoom-in simulations:
  constraining stellar migration in the solar cylinder using asteroseismology
  Large-scale stellar surveys coupled with recent developments in
magneto-hydrodynamical simulations of the formation of Milky Way-mass galaxies
provide an unparalleled opportunity to unveil the physical processes driving
the evolution of the Galaxy. We developed a framework to compare a variety of
parameters with their corresponding predictions from simulations in an unbiased
manner, taking into account the selection function of a stellar survey. We
applied this framework to a sample of over 7000 stars with asteroseismic,
spectroscopic, and astrometric data available, together with 6 simulations from
the Auriga project. We found that some simulations are able to produce
abundance dichotomies in the $[{\rm Fe}/{\rm H}]-[\alpha/{\rm Fe}]$ plane which
look qualitatively similar to observations. The peak of their velocity
distributions match the observed data reasonably well, however they predict
hotter kinematics in terms of the tails of the distributions and the vertical
velocity dispersion. Assuming our simulation sample is representative of Milky
Way-like galaxies, we put upper limits of 2.21 and 3.70 kpc on radial migration
for young ($< 4$ Gyr) and old ($\in [4, 8]$ Gyr) stellar populations in the
solar cylinder. Comparison between the observed and simulated metallicity
dispersion as a function of age further constrains migration to about 1.97 and
2.91 kpc for the young and old populations. These results demonstrate the power
of our technique to compare numerical simulations with high-dimensional
datasets, and paves the way for using the wider field TESS asteroseismic data
together with the future generations of simulations to constrain the subgrid
models for turbulence, star formation and feedback processes.
