Chemical inhomogeneities in the old stellar populations of the Local Group

Mathematics

Scientific paper

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Local Group, Stellar Populations

Scientific paper

The old stars with ages of order of 10 Gyr in the Local Group (LG) are the legacy of the first epoch of star formation. We investigate the properties of these old stellar populations in several Milky Way Globular Clusters (GCs) and LG dwarf spheroidal (dSph) galaxies. In GCs we study spectroscopically the interplay between internal stellar evolution, the second parameter problem of the horizontal branch (HB) morphology, and star-to-star abundance variations within these clusters. We cannot find evidence for a direct link between chemical inhomogeneities in GCs and the second parameter problem, and internal stellar evolution. Indeed, we demonstrate that internal stellar evolution cannot be the primary driver of the abundance variations in GCs and favor scenarios of accretion of nucleosynthesized material or primordial variations. In the second part we use HB stars to trace population gradients in the LG dSphs photometrically ("internal second parameter effect") and find in many galaxies the red HB stars to be more centrally-concentrated than the blue HB stars. We identify metallicity as the dominant driver of these gradients in dSphs, while age only seems to play a minor role. We discuss the population gradients in dSphs in the context of the formation process of these low-mass galaxies.

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