Visitors from the Halo: 11 Gyr old White Dwarfs in the Solar Neighborhood
Mukremin Kilic, Jeffrey A. Munn, Kurtis A. Williams, P. M. Kowalski, Ted von Hippel, Hugh C. Harris, Elizabeth J. Jeffery, Steven DeGennaro, Warren R. Brown, B. McLeod
We report the discovery of three nearby old halo white dwarf candidates in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), including two stars in a common proper motion binary system. These candidates are selected from our 2800 square degree proper motion survey on the Bok and U.S. Naval Observatory Flagstaff Station 1.3m telescopes, and they display proper motions of 0.4-0.5 arcsec/yr. Follow-up MMT spectroscopy and near-infrared photometry demonstrate that all three objects are hydrogen-dominated atmosphere white dwarfs with Teff = 3700 - 4100 K. For average mass white dwarfs, these temperature estimates correspond to cooling ages of 9-10 Gyr, distances of 70-80 pc, and tangential velocities of 140-200 km/s. Based on the UVW space velocities, we conclude that they most likely belong to the halo. Furthermore, the combined main-sequence and white dwarf cooling ages are 10-11 Gyr. Along with SDSS J1102+4113, they are the oldest field white dwarfs currently known. These three stars represent only a small fraction of the halo white dwarf candidates in our proper motion survey, and they demonstrate that deep imaging surveys like the Pan-STARRS and Large Synoptic Survey Telescope should find many old thick disk and halo white dwarfs that can be used to constrain the age of the Galactic thick disk and halo.
We report the identification of a set of old super metal-rich dwarf stars with orbits of low eccentricity that reach a maximum height from the Galactic plane between ~0.5-1.5 kpc. We discuss their properties to understand their origins. We use data from the internal data release 6 of the Gaia-ESO Survey. We selected stars observed at high resolution with abundances of 21 species of 18 individual elements. We apply hierarchical clustering to group the stars with similar chemical abundances within the complete chemical abundance space. According to their chemical properties, this set of super me…
With the calculated guiding center radius $R_{guiding}$ and birth radius $R_{birth}$, we investigate the role of radial migration on the description of lithium evolution in the Galactic disk based on the upper envelope of the A(Li) vs. [Fe/H] diagram. Using migration distances, we find that stars in the solar neighborhood are born at different locations in the galactic disk, and cannot all be explained by models of chemical evolution in the solar neighborhood. It is found that the upper envelope of the A(Li) vs. [Fe/H] diagram varies significantly with $R_{birth}$, which explains the decrease …
We combine photometric metallicities with astrometry from Gaia DR3 to examine the chemodynamic structure of ~250,000 K dwarfs in the Solar Neighborhood (SN). In kinematics, we observe ridges/clumps of "kinematic groups", like studies of more massive main-sequence stars. Here we note clear differences in both metallicity and vertical velocity as compared to the surrounding regions in velocity space and hypothesize this is due to differences in mean age. To test this, we develop a method to estimate the age distribution of sub-populations of stars. In this method, we use GALAH data to define pro…
Galactic chemical evolution (GCE), solar analogues or twins, and peculiarities of the solar composition with respect to the twins are inextricably related. We examine GCE parameters from the literature and present newly derived values using a quadratic fit that gives zero for a Solar age (i.e., 4.6 Gyr). We show how the GCE parameters may be used not only to "correct" abundances to the solar age, but to predict relative elemental abundances as a function of age. We address the question of whether the solar abundances are depleted in refractories and enhanced in volatiles and find that the answ…
We present the results of a density-based clustering analysis of the 6-dimensional XYZ Galactic positions and UVW space velocities of nearby ($\leq$ 200 pc) Gaia EDR3 stars with radial velocities using HDBSCAN, in opposition to previous studies that only included positions and tangential velocities. Among the 241 recovered clusters, we identify more than 50 known associations, 32 new candidate stellar streams aged 100 Myr-3 Gyr, 9 extensions of known Theia groups uncovered by Kounkel & Covey (2019), and 8 newly recognized coronae around nearby open clusters. Three confirmed exoplanet-hosting s…
We determined the ages, the kinematic parameters and Galactic orbital parameters of six metal-poor (-2.4<[Fe/H]<-1 dex) F-type high proper motion (HPM) stars to investigate their HPM nature and origin. For the kinematical procedure, the astrometric data from the Gaia DR2 was used. High resolution ELODIE spectra of the six dwarfs were also used to obtain accurate [Fe/H] abundances and up-to-date [$α$/Fe] abundances. The calculations for stellar ages were based on Bayesian statistics, with the computed ages falling in the range 9.5-10.1 Gyrs. On the basis of the metallicities and ages, six HMP s…
Kinematics of the local disk from the RAVE survey and the Gaia first data release
我们试图约束的薄和厚磁盘使用贝桑松人口合成模型与RAVE DR 4和盖亚第一次数据发布（TGAS）的运动学。通过应用详细的目标选择函数模拟了RAVE场，并使用取决于年龄的速度椭球计算了运动学，以研究长期演化。我们占了非对称漂移计算拟合Stackel潜在的轨道。使用ABC-MCMC方法调整模型参数，如速度分散、平均运动和速度梯度。我们利用金属丰度来增强薄盘和厚盘之间的分离。我们表明，该模型是能够再现本地磁盘的运动学非常详细。磁盘按照预期的长期演变，在非常好的协议与以前的研究薄盘。新的非对称漂移公式，适合于我们以前描述的Stäckel势，相当好地再现了在一个广泛的太阳附近的速度分布。用这种方法测定的太阳运动的U和W分量与前人的研究结果符合得很好。然而，我们发现一个比以前认为的更小的V分量，主要是因为我们包括了不对称漂移随到平面的距离的变化。厚盘是由一个长期的形成（至少2 Gyr），在此期间，我们表明，平均速度随时间增加，而规模的高度和规模的长度减少，非常一致的崩溃阶段与角动量守恒。这个新的银河系动力学模型能够在TGAS-RAVE样本的质量水平上再现在广泛的太阳邻域中观测到的速度，使我们能够约束薄盘和厚盘的动力学演化，以及确定太阳运动。
Stellar and supernova nucleosynthesis in the first few billion years of the cosmic history have set the scene for early structure formation in the Universe, while little is known about their nature. Making use of stellar physical parameters measured by GALAH Data Release 3 with accurate astrometry from the Gaia EDR3, we have selected $\sim 100$ old main-sequence turn-off stars (ages $\gtrsim 12$ Gyrs) with kinematics compatible with the Milky Way stellar halo population in the Solar neighborhood. Detailed homogeneous elemental abundance estimates by GALAH DR3 are compared with supernova yield …
