The First Chemical Abundance Study of the Hercules Dwarf Spheroidal Galaxy

Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy

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Scientific paper

We present the first results from a chemical abundance analysis of three red giants in the newly discovered Hercules dwarf spheroidal galaxy. Our study is based on high-resolution, high S/N, spectra taken with the MIKE spectrograph on the 6.5m Magellan/Clay telescope. Colors and radial velocities of our targets are consistent with their membership within this galaxy.
Our results indicate that Hercules is a metal poor system with [Fe/H] between -1.7 and -2 dex. The alpha-element ratios such as [Ca/Fe] are deficient compared to Galactic halo stars of the same metallicity. Therefore, accretion of low-mass dSphs similar to Hercules cannot have contributed significantly to the Galactic halo formation.
While all of our stars have relatively low [Ba/Fe] ratios, one of the targets stands out in terms of a strong Ba depletion. Such s-process deficent stars will enable us to place intriguing constraints on the modes of star formation in these low-mass systems, which may fill in a gap between the globular cluster and the dwarf galaxy regime.

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