It is now well-established that the elemental abundance patterns of stars holds key clues not only to their formation but also to the assembly histories of galaxies. One of the most exciting possibilities is the use of stellar abundance patterns as "chemical tags" to identify stars that were born in the same molecular cloud. In this paper we assess the prospects of chemical tagging as a function of several key underlying parameters. We show that in the fiducial case of $10^4$ distinct cells in chemical space and $10^5-10^6$ stars in the survey, one can expect to detect $\sim 10^2-10^3$ groups that are $\ge 5σ$ overdensities in the chemical space. However, we find that even very large overdensities in chemical space do not guarantee that the overdensity is due to a single set of stars from a common birth cloud. In fact, for our fiducial model parameters, the typical $5σ$ overdensity is comprised of stars from a wide range of clusters with the most dominant cluster contributing only 25% of the stars. The most important factors limiting the identification of disrupted clusters via chemical tagging are the number of chemical cells in the chemical space and the survey sampling rate of the underlying stellar population. Both of these factors can be improved through strategic observational plans. While recovering individual clusters through chemical tagging may prove challenging, we show, in agreement with previous work, that different CMFs imprint different degrees of clumpiness in chemical space. These differences provide the opportunity to statistically reconstruct the slope and high mass cutoff of CMF and its evolution through cosmic time.
Using kinematics from Gaia and the large elemental abundance space of the second data release of the GALAH survey, we identify two new members of the Fimbulthul stellar stream, and chemically tag them to massive, multi-metallic globular cluster $ω$ Centauri. Recent analysis of the second data release of Gaia had revealed the Fimbulthul stellar stream in the halo of the Milky Way. It had been proposed that the stream is associated with the $ω$ Centauri, but this proposition relied exclusively upon the kinematics and metallicities of the stars to make the association. In this work, we find our t…
Chemical tagging has great promise as a technique to unveil our Galaxy's history. Grouping stars based on their similar chemistry can establish details of the star formation and merger history of the Milky Way. With precise measurements of stellar chemistry, chemical tagging may be able to group together stars born from the same gas cloud, regardless of their current positions and kinematics. Successfully tagging these birth clusters requires high quality chemical space information and a good cluster-finding algorithm. To test the feasibility of chemical tagging on data from current and upcomi…
Chemically tagging stars back to common formation sites in the Milky Way and establishing a high level of chemical homogeneity in these chemically tagged birth clusters is crucial for understanding the chemical and dynamical history of the Galactic disc. We constrain the intrinsic abundance scatter in 17 newly chemically tagged dissolved birth clusters found in the APOGEE survey by modelling APOGEE spectra as a one-dimensional function of initial stellar mass, performing forward modelling of the observed stellar spectra, then comparing the data and simulations using Approximate Bayesian Comput…
Chemically tagging groups of stars born in the same birth cluster is a major goal of spectroscopic surveys. To investigate the feasibility of such strong chemical tagging, we perform a blind chemical tagging experiment on abundances measured from APOGEE survey spectra. We apply a density-based clustering algorithm to the eight dimensional chemical space defined by [Mg/Fe], [Al/Fe], [Si/Fe], [K/Fe], [Ti/Fe], [Mn/Fe], [Fe/H], and [Ni/Fe], abundances ratios which together span multiple nucleosynthetic channels. In a high quality sample of 182,538 giant stars, we detect twenty-one candidate cluste…
One of the high-level goals of Galactic archaeology is chemical tagging of stars across the Milky Way to piece together its assembly history. For this to work, stars born together must be uniquely chemically homogeneous. Wide binary systems are an important laboratory to test this underlying assumption. Here we present the detailed chemical abundance patterns of 50 stars across 25 wide binary systems comprised of main-sequence stars of similar spectral type identified in Gaia DR2 with the aim of quantifying their level of chemical homogeneity. Using high-resolution spectra obtained with McDona…
Recovering extra-tidal open cluster members via multi-elemental chemical tagging
Instituto Interdisciplinario de Ciencias Básicas (ICB), CONICET-UNCuyo（基础科学跨研究所 (ICB)，CONICET-门多萨大学）；Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas（国家科学研究委员会）
Ongoing surveys are in the process of measuring the chemical abundances in large numbers of stars, with the ultimate goal of reconstructing the formation history of the Milky Way using abundances as tracers. However, interpretation of these data requires that we understand the relationship between stellar distributions in chemical and physical space, i.e., how similar in chemical abundance do we expect a pair of stars to be as a function of the distance between their formation sites. We investigate this question by simulating the gravitational collapse of a turbulent molecular cloud extracted …
Two faces of Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus: Mining the chemical abundance space with graph attention networks
INAF - Osservatorio Astronomico di Padova（意大利国家天体物理研究所帕多瓦天文台）；Dipartimento di Fisica e Astronomia, Università di Padova（帕多瓦大学物理与天文学系）；INAF - Osservatorio Astrofisico di Arcetri（意大利国家天体物理研究所阿切特里天文台）；INAF - IASF-Milano（意大利国家天体物理研究所米兰天文物理研究所）；University of Birmingham（伯明翰大学）；INAF - Osservatorio Astronomico di Brera（意大利国家天体物理研究所布雷拉天文台）
University College London（伦敦大学学院）；Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）；Flatiron Institute（弗莱提荣研究所）；Leiden University（莱顿大学）
Modern astronomical surveys are observing spectral data for millions of stars. These spectra contain chemical information that can be used to trace the Galaxy's formation and chemical enrichment history. However, extracting the information from spectra, and making precise and accurate chemical abundance measurements are challenging. Here, we present a data-driven method for isolating the chemical factors of variation in stellar spectra from those of other parameters (i.e. \teff, \logg, \feh). This enables us to build a spectral projection for each star with these parameters removed. We do this…
The fastest moving stars provide insight into several fundamental properties of the Galaxy, including the escape velocity as a function of Galactocentric radius, the total mass, and the nature and frequency of stellar encounters with the central supermassive black hole. The recent second data release of Gaia has allowed the identification of new samples of stars with extreme velocities. Discrimination among the possible origins of these stars is facilitated by chemical abundance information. We here report the results from our high-resolution spectroscopic followup, using the Apache Point Obse…
oMEGACat. IX. Chemical Tagging of Omega Centauri Populations with Machine-Learning-Inferred Abundances from the MUSE Spectrograph
University of Utah（犹他大学）；Max Planck Institute for Astronomy（马克斯·普朗克天文学研究所）；European Southern Observatory（欧洲南方天文台）；Liverpool John Moores University（利物浦约翰摩尔斯大学）；Georg-August-Universität Göttingen（哥廷根大学）
We have developed a novel technique based on a clustering algorithm which searches for kinematically- and chemically-clustered stars in the APOGEE DR12 Cannon data. As compared to classical chemical tagging, the kinematic information included in our methodology allows us to identify stars that are members of known globular clusters with greater confidence. We apply our algorithm to the entire APOGEE catalog of 150,615 stars whose chemical abundances are derived by the Cannon. Our methodology found anti-correlations between the elements Al and Mg, Na and O, and C and N previously identified in …
Recent results from chemical tagging studies using APOGEE data suggest a strong link between the chemical abundance patterns of stars found within globular clusters, and chemically peculiar populations in the Galactic halo field. In this paper we analyse the chemical compositions of stars within the cluster body and tidal streams of Palomar 5, a globular cluster that is being tidally disrupted by interaction with the Galactic gravitational potential. We report the identification of nitrogen-rich (N-rich) stars both within and beyond the tidal radius of Palomar 5, with the latter being clearly …
Since the advent of $Gaia$ astrometry, it is possible to identify massive accreted systems within the Galaxy through their unique dynamical signatures. One such system, $Gaia$-Sausage-Enceladus (GSE), appears to be an early "building block" given its virial mass $> 10^{10}\,\mathrm{M_\odot}$ at infall ($z\sim1-3$). In order to separate the progenitor population from the background stars, we investigate its chemical properties with up to 30 element abundances from the GALAH+ Survey Data Release 3 (DR3). To inform our choice of elements for purely chemically selecting accreted stars, we analyse …
The chemo-dynamical complexity of ω Centauri: different kinematics for different populations
Université de Strasbourg（斯特拉斯堡大学）；Observatoire Astronomique de Strasbourg（斯特拉斯堡天文台）；Centre national d’études spatiales (CNES)（法国国家空间研究中心）；LIRA, Observatoire de Paris, Université PSL, Sorbonne Université, Université Paris Cité, CY Cergy Paris Université（巴黎天文台LIRA实验室，巴黎文理研究大学，索邦大学，巴黎西岱大学，CY塞吉-蓬图瓦兹大学）；Dipartimento di Fisica e Astronomia “Galileo Galilei”, Università di Padova（帕多瓦大学伽利略·伽利莱物理与天文学系）；Dipartimento di Tecnica e Gestione dei Sistemi Industriali, Università degli Studi di Padova（帕多瓦大学工业系统技术与管理系）；Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica – Osservatorio Astronomico di Padova（意大利国家天体物理研究所帕多瓦天文台）
The high-altitude, inner-disc, and chemically peculiar open cluster UBC 1052
Universitat de Barcelona (UB)（巴塞罗那大学）；Institut d’Estudis Espacials de Catalunya (IEEC)（加泰罗尼亚空间研究所）；Observatoire de Paris, Université PSL, Sorbonne Université, Université Paris Cité, CY Cergy Paris Université, CNRS（巴黎天文台，巴黎文理研究大学，索邦大学，巴黎西岱大学，塞吉-蓬图瓦兹大学，法国国家科学研究中心）；Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics（哈佛-史密森尼天体物理中心）；Faculty of Psychology, UniDistance Suisse（瑞士远程大学心理学学院）
University College London（伦敦大学学院）；Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）；Flatiron Institute（弗莱迪龙研究所）
Identification of chemically similar stars using elemental abundances is core to many pursuits within Galactic archaeology. However, measuring the chemical likeness of stars using abundances directly is limited by systematic imprints of imperfect synthetic spectra in abundance derivation. We present a novel data-driven model that is capable of identifying chemically similar stars from spectra alone. We call this Relevant Scaled Component Analysis (RSCA). RSCA finds a mapping from stellar spectra to a representation that optimizes recovery of known open clusters. By design, RSCA amplifies facto…
Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias（加那利群岛天体物理研究所）；Universidad de La Laguna（拉古纳大学）
The vast volume of data generated by modern astronomical surveys offers test beds for the application of machine-learning. It is important to evaluate potential existing tools and determine those that are optimal for extracting scientific knowledge from the available observations. We explore the possibility of using clustering algorithms to separate stellar populations with distinct chemical patterns. Star clusters are likely the most chemically homogeneous populations in the Galaxy, and therefore any practical approach to identifying distinct stellar populations should at least be able to sep…
On the connection between nitrogen-enhanced field stars and the Galactic globular clusters
Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge（剑桥大学天文研究所）；School of Mathematics and Physics, The University of Queensland（昆士兰大学数理学院）；Center for Computational Astrophysics, Flatiron Institute（平顿研究所计算天体物理学中心）；Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics, The University of Chicago（芝加哥大学天文学与天体物理学系）
In the era of industrial Galactic astronomy and multi-object spectroscopic stellar surveys, the sample sizes and the number of available stellar chemical abundances have reached dimensions in which it has become difficult to process all the available information in an effective manner. In this paper we demonstrate the use of a dimensionality-reduction technique (t-distributed stochastic neighbour embedding; t-SNE) for analysing the stellar abundance-space distribution. While the non-parametric non-linear behaviour of this technique makes it difficult to estimate the significance of found abund…
Comoving pairs, even at the separations of $\mathcal{O}(10^6)\,$AU, are a predicted reservoir of conatal stars. We present detailed chemical abundances of 62 stars in 31 comoving pairs with separations of $10^2 - 10^7\,$AU and 3D velocity differences $< 2 \mathrm{\ km \ s^{-1}}$. This sample includes both bound comoving pairs/wide binaries and unbound comoving pairs. Observations were taken using the MIKE spectrograph on the Magellan/Clay Telescope at high resolution ($\mathrm{R} \sim 45,000$) with a typical signal-to-noise ratio of 150 per pixel. With these spectra, we measure surface abundan…
