StarGO: A New Method to Identify the Galactic Origins of Halo Stars
  We develop a new method StarGO (Stars' Galactic Origin) to identify the
galactic origins of halo stars using their kinematics. Our method is based on
self-organizing map (SOM), which is one of the most popular unsupervised
learning algorithms. StarGO combines SOM with a novel adaptive group
identification algorithm with essentially no free parameters. In order to
evaluate our model, we build a synthetic stellar halo from mergers of nine
satellites in the Milky Way. We construct the mock catalogue by extracting a
heliocentric volume of 10 kpc from our simulations and assigning expected
observational uncertainties corresponding to bright stars from Gaia DR2 and
LAMOST DR5. We compare the results from StarGO against that from a
Friends-of-Friends (FoF) based method in the space of orbital energy and
angular momentum. We show that StarGO is able to systematically identify more
satellites and achieve higher number fraction of identified stars for most of
the satellites within the extracted volume. When applied to data from Gaia DR2,
StarGO will enable us to reveal the origins of the inner stellar halo in
unprecedented detail.
