Height zero characters and Galois automorphisms

Let $G$ be a finite group and let $p$ be a prime. In this paper, we prove a strengthened version of Brauer’s height zero conjecture for the principal $p$-block of $G$ that takes the action of a certain group of Galois automorphisms into account. This answers a conjecture recently proposed by Malle, Moretó, Rizo and Schaeffer Fry. We then use this to obtain a structural result which can be seen as a Galois version of the Itô-Michler theorem.