Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy
Scientific paper
Jan 2010
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2010aas...21542510s&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #215, #425.10; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 42, p.337
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astronomy
Scientific paper
We will present high resolution spectra measurements for Lanthanum, Europium and Iron in 760 disk stars. The bulk of our data are planet search spectra taken with HIRES on the Keck I telescope at R 50,000. A small subset of kinematicly selected stars were observed on the Harlan J. Smith Telescope at McDonald Observatory at R 60,000 and S/N 100 at the 3988 Å Lanthanum line and S/N 250 around 5240 Å near our Iron lines. We use the technique of chemical tagging to investigate the possibility that these kinematicly selected stars are remnants of accreted objects of extragalactic origin or, alternatively, dynamical in origin. Lanthanum and Europium are of special interest because they are produced primarily by the s and r processes, respectively. Because these elements are synthesized in different mass stars and are returned to the interstellar medium on different timescales, the ratio [Eu/La] is a tracer of the star formation rate.
To apply spectroscopy to such a large set of data, we have developed an automated process that fits the observations to synthetic spectra using an unnormalized χ2 metric to determine [Fe/H], [Eu/H],[La/H], and vbroad. We estimate log(g) from parallax data, and then verify the results spectroscopically. We are using ATLAS 9 model atmospheres and synthetic spectra calculated using MOOG.
Our kinematicly selected subset was originally noticed by Helmi et al (2006) where they statistically argued for kinematic substructure in the disk. The stars are interesting at first glance because they are in overdense portions of phase space, a hallmark of accreted objects according to computer models. Further, these stars have different photometric metallicities than the disk at large, and in color-magnitude plots one or more turn offs can be seen.
Carney Bruce W.
Stringer Christopher
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