The Carina Project. VIII. The {\alpha}-element abundances
| Autor: | Fabrizio, M., Nonino, M., Bono, G., Primas, F., Thévenin, F., Stetson, P. B., Cassisi, S., Buonanno, R., Coppola, G., da Silva, R. O., Dall'Ora, M., Ferraro, I., Genovali, K., Gilmozzi, R., Iannicola, G., Marconi, M., Monelli, M., Romaniello, M., Walker, A. R. |
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| Rok vydání: | 2015 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | A&A 580, A18 (2015) |
| Druh dokumentu: | Working Paper |
| DOI: | 10.1051/0004-6361/201525753 |
| Popis: | We have performed a new abundance analysis of Carina Red Giant (RG) stars from spectroscopic data collected with UVES (high resolution) and FLAMES/GIRAFFE (high and medium resolution) at ESO/VLT. The former sample includes 44 RGs, while the latter consists of 65 (high) and ~800 (medium resolution) RGs, covering a significant fraction of the galaxy's RG branch (RGB), and red clump stars. To improve the abundance analysis at the faint magnitude limit, the FLAMES/GIRAFFE data were divided into ten surface gravity and effective temperature bins. The spectra of the stars belonging to the same gravity/temperature bin were stacked. This approach allowed us to increase by at least a factor of five the signal-to-noise ratio in the faint limit (V>20.5mag). We took advantage of the new photometry index cU,B,I introduced by Monelli et al. (2014), as an age and probably a metallicity indicator, to split stars along the RGB. These two stellar populations display distinct [Fe/H] and [Mg/H] distributions: their mean Fe abundances are -2.15$\pm$0.06dex (sig=0.28), and -1.75$\pm$0.03dex (sig=0.21), respectively. The two iron distributions differ at the 75% level. This supports preliminary results by Lemasle et al. (2012) and by Monelli et al. (2014). Moreover, we found that the old and intermediate-age stellar populations have mean [Mg/H] abundances of -1.91$\pm$0.05dex (sig=0.22) and -1.35$\pm$0.03dex (sig=0.22); these differ at the 83% level. Carina's {\alpha}-element abundances agree, within 1sigma, with similar abundances for field Halo stars and for cluster (Galactic, Magellanic) stars. The same outcome applies to nearby dwarf spheroidals and ultra-faint dwarf galaxies, in the iron range covered by Carina stars. Finally, we found evidence of a clear correlation between Na and O abundances, thus suggesting that Carina's chemical enrichment history is quite different than in the globular clusters. Comment: 21 pages, 19 figures, 11 tables, accepted for publication in A&A |
| Databáze: | arXiv |
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