Cosmological insights into the assembly of the radial and compact
  stellar halo of the Milky Way
  Recent studies using Gaia DR2 have identified a massive merger in the history
of the Milky Way (MW) whose debris is markedly radial and counterrotating. This
event, known as the Gaia-Enceladus/Gaia-Sausage (GE/GS), is also hypothesized
to have built the majority of the inner stellar halo. We use the cosmological
hydrodynamic simulation Illustris to place this merger in the context of galaxy
assembly within $\Lambda$CDM. From $\sim$150 MW analogs, $\sim 80 \%$ have
experienced at least one merger of similar mass and infall time as GE/GS.
Within this sample, 37 have debris as radial as that of the GE/GS, which we dub
the Ancient Radial Mergers (ARMs). Counterrotation is not rare among ARMs, with
$43 \%$ having $>40 \%$ of their debris in counterrotating orbits. However, the
compactness inferred for the GE/GS debris, given its large $\beta$ and its
substantial contribution to the stellar halo, is more difficult to reproduce.
The median radius of ARM debris is r$_{*,deb}\simeq 45$kpc, while GE/GS is
thought to be mostly contained within $r\sim 30$ kpc. For most MW analogs, a
few mergers are required to build the inner stellar halo, and ARM debris only
accounts for $\sim 12 \%$ of inner accreted stars. Encouragingly, we find one
ARM that is both compact and dominates the inner halo of its central, making it
our best GE/GS analog. Interestingly, this merger deposits a significant number
of stars (M$_*\simeq1.5 \times 10^9 M_\odot$) in the outer halo, suggesting
that an undiscovered section of GE/GS may await detection.
