Stellar Halo Memory: A New Observable for Galactic Archaeology

Abstract

The Galactic stellar halo preserves a fossil record of the Milky Way's assembly history, yet there is currently no unified framework for quantifying how much of this information survives in the present-day Galaxy. We introduce an information-theoretic framework that establishes stellar halo memory as a directly measurable observable for Galactic archaeology. Using APOGEE Data Release 17 halo stars, we quantify the statistically significant information shared among stellar dynamical and chemical observables through the excess mutual information, enabling a physically motivated decomposition into dynamical, chemical, and cross-memory reservoirs. We construct cumulative radial memory profiles together with two dimensionless diagnostics, the memory dominance ratio and the coupling efficiency, to investigate how the surviving assembly memory is partitioned throughout the Galactic halo. We find that the different memory observables exhibit distinct radial evolution in the inner halo but all evolve toward a common statistically significant residual memory state beyond $\sim 20$ kpc. Comparison with randomized realizations demonstrates that the measured memories exceed the corresponding null expectation by large factors, confirming that they represent genuine astrophysical structure rather than statistical fluctuations. The surviving assembly memory is consistently dominated by dynamical correlations while retaining a finite chemo-dynamical coupling across the halo. These results suggest that phase mixing redistributes, rather than completely erases, the memory imprinted during galaxy formation. Our study establishes stellar halo memory as a new observable for Galactic archaeology and provides a unified statistical framework for investigating galaxy assembly in both observations and cosmological simulations.