1. |
- Bergemann, Maria, et al.
(författare)
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The Gaia-ESO Survey : Hydrogen lines in red giants directly trace stellar mass
- 2016
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Ingår i: Astronomy and Astrophysics. - : EDP Sciences. - 0004-6361 .- 1432-0746. ; 594
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Red giant stars are perhaps the most important type of stars for Galactic and extra-galactic archaeology: they are luminous, occur in all stellar populations, and their surface temperatures allow precise abundance determinations for many different chemical elements. Yet, the full star formation and enrichment history of a galaxy can be traced directly only if two key observables can be determined for large stellar samples: age and chemical composition. While spectroscopy is a powerful method to analyse the detailed abundances of stars, stellar ages are the missing link in the chain, since they are not a direct observable. However, spectroscopy should be able to estimate stellar masses, which for red giants directly infer ages provided their chemical composition is known. Here we establish a new empirical relation between the shape of the hydrogen line in the observed spectra of red giants and stellar mass determined from asteroseismology. The relation allows determining stellar masses and ages with an accuracy of 10-15%. The method can be used with confidence for stars in the following range of stellar parameters: 4000 < T-eff < 5000 K, 0.5 < log g < 3.5, -2.0 < [ Fe/H] < 0.3, and luminosities log L/L-Sun < 2.5. Our analysis provides observational evidence that the H-alpha spectral characteristics of red giant stars are tightly correlated with their mass and therefore their age. We also show that the method samples well all stellar populations with ages above 1 Gyr. Targeting bright giants, the method allows obtaining simultaneous age and chemical abundance information far deeper than would be possible with asteroseismology, extending the possible survey volume to remote regions of the Milky Way and even to neighbouring galaxies such as Andromeda or the Magellanic Clouds even with current instrumentation, such as the VLT and Keck facilities.
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2. |
- Guerco, Rafael, et al.
(författare)
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Fluorine Abundances in the Globular Cluster M4
- 2019
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Ingår i: Astrophysical Journal. - : IOP PUBLISHING LTD. - 0004-637X .- 1538-4357. ; 876:1
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- We present chemical abundances for the elements carbon, sodium, and fluorine in 15 red giants of the globular cluster M4, as well as six red giants of the globular cluster w Centauri. The chemical abundances were calculated in LTE via spectral synthesis. The spectra analyzed are high-resolution spectra obtained in the near-infrared region around 2.3 mu m with the Phoenix spectrograph on the 8.1 m Gemini South Telescope, the IGRINS spectrograph on the McDonald Observatory 2.7 m Telescope, and the CRIRES spectrograph on the ESO 8.2 m Very Large Telescope. The results indicate a significant reduction in the fluorine abundances when compared to previous values from the literature for M4 and w Centauri, due to a downward revision in the excitation potentials of the HF (1-0) R9 line used in the analysis. The fluorine abundances obtained for the M4 red giants are found to be anticorrelated with those of Na, following the typical pattern of abundance variations seen in globular clusters between distinct stellar populations. In M4, as the Na abundance increases by similar to+0.4 dex, the F abundance decreases by similar to-0.2 dex. A comparison with abundance predictions from two sets of stellar evolution models finds that the models predict somewhat less F depletion (similar to-0.1 dex) for the same increase of +0.4 dex in Na.
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3. |
- Kunder, Andrea, et al.
(författare)
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THE RADIAL VELOCITY EXPERIMENT (RAVE) : FIFTH DATA RELEASE
- 2017
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Ingår i: The Astronomical Journal. - : American Astronomical Society. - 0004-6256 .- 1538-3881. ; 153:2
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Data Release 5 (DR5) of the Radial Velocity Experiment (RAVE) is the fifth data release from a magnitude-limited (9 < I < 12) survey of stars randomly selected in the Southern Hemisphere. The RAVE medium-resolution spectra (R ∼ 7500) covering the Ca-triplet region (8410-8795 A) span the complete time frame from the start of RAVE observations in 2003 to their completion in 2013. Radial velocities from 520,781 spectra of 457,588 unique stars are presented, of which 255,922 stellar observations have parallaxes and proper motions from the Tycho-Gaia astrometric solution in Gaia DR1. For our main DR5 catalog, stellar parameters (effective temperature, surface gravity, and overall metallicity) are computed using the RAVE DR4 stellar pipeline, but calibrated using recent K2 Campaign 1 seismic gravities and Gaia benchmark stars, as well as results obtained from high-resolution studies. Also included are temperatures from the Infrared Flux Method, and we provide a catalog of red giant stars in the dereddened color - (J Ks) 0 interval (0.50, 0.85) for which the gravities were calibrated based only on seismology. Further data products for subsamples of the RAVE stars include individual abundances for Mg, Al, Si, Ca, Ti, Fe, and Ni, and distances found using isochrones. Each RAVE spectrum is complemented by an error spectrum, which has been used to determine uncertainties on the parameters. The data can be accessed via the RAVE Web site or the VizieR database.
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4. |
- Piotto, Giampaolo, et al.
(författare)
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Relative Frequencies of Blue Stragglers in Galactic Globular Clusters: Constraints for the Formation Mechanisms
- 2004
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Ingår i: Astrophysical Journal. - : American Astronomical Society. - 0004-637X .- 1538-4357. ; 604:2, s. 109-112
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- We discuss the main properties of the Galactic globular cluster (GC)blue straggler stars (BSSs), as inferred from our new catalog containingnearly 3000 BSSs. The catalog has been extracted from thephotometrically homogeneous V versus (B-V) color-magnitude diagrams(CMDs) of 56 GCs, based on Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 images of theircentral cores. In our analysis, we used consistent relative distancesbased on the same photometry and calibration. The number of BSSs hasbeen normalized to obtain relative frequencies (FBSS) andspecific densities (NS) using different stellar populationsextracted from the CMD. The cluster FBSS is significantlysmaller than the relative frequency of field BSSs. We find a significantanticorrelation between the BSS relative frequency in a cluster and itstotal absolute luminosity (mass). There is no statistically significanttrend between the BSS frequency and the expected collision rate. Thevalue of FBSS does not depend on other cluster parameters,apart from a mild dependence on the central density. Post-core-collapseclusters act like normal clusters as far as the BSS frequency isconcerned. We also show that the BSS luminosity function for the mostluminous clusters is significantly different, with a brighter peak andextending to brighter luminosities than in the less luminous clusters.These results imply that the efficiency of BSS production mechanisms andtheir relative importance vary with the cluster mass.Based on observations with the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, obtainedat the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by theAssociation of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under NASAcontract NAS 5-26555.
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