The chemical evolution of neutron capture elements in the Milky Way disc is still a matter of debate. We aim to understand the chemical evolution of r-process elements in Milky Way disc. We focus on three pure r-process elements Eu, Gd, and Dy. Using high-resolution FEROS, HARPS, and UVES spectra from the ESO archive, we perform a homogeneous analysis on 6500 FGK Milky Way stars, thanks to the automatic optimization pipeline GAUGUIN. We present abundances of Ba (5057 stars), Eu (6268 stars), Gd (5431 stars), and Dy (5479 stars). We chemically characterize the thin and the thick discs, and a metal-rich alpha-rich population. We find that the [Eu/Fe] ratio follows a continuous sequence from the thin disc to the thick disc as a function of the metallicity. In thick disc stars, the [Eu/Ba] ratio is found to be constant, while the [Gd/Ba] and [Dy/Ba] ratios decrease as a function of the metallicity. These observations clearly indicate a different nucleosynthesis history in the thick disc between Eu and Gd-Dy. We also find that the alpha-rich metal-rich stars are also enriched in r-process elements (like thick disc stars), but their [Ba/Fe] is very different from thick disc stars. Finally, we find that the [r/α] ratio tends to decrease with metallicity, indicating that supernovae of different properties probably contribute differently to the synthesis of r-process elements and α-elements. We provide average abundance trends for [Ba/Fe] and [Eu/Fe] with rather small dispersions, and for the first time for [Gd/Fe] and [Dy/Fe]. This data may help to constrain chemical evolution models of Milky Way r- and s-process elements and the yields of massive stars. Including yields of neutron-star or black hole mergers is now crucial if we want to quantitatively compare observations to Galactic chemical evolution models.
We study the chemical evolution of the thick and thin discs of the Galaxy by comparing detailed chemical evolution models with recent data from the AMBRE Project. The data suggest that the stars in the thick and thin discs form two distinct sequences with the thick disc stars showing higher [α/Fe] ratios. We adopt two different approaches to model the evolution of thick and thin discs. In particular, we adopt: i) a two-infall approach where the thick disc forms fast and before the thin disc and by means of a fast gas accretion episode, whereas the thin disc forms by means of a second accretion…
Recent observations suggest a "double-branch" behaviour of Li/H versus metallicity in the local thick and thin discs. This is reminiscent of the corresponding O/Fe versus Fe/H behaviour, which has been explained as resulting from radial migration in the Milky Way disc. We use a semi-analytical model of disc evolution with updated chemical yields and parameterised radial migration. We explore the cases of long-lived (red giants of a few Gy lifetime) and shorter-lived (Asymptotic Giant Branch stars of several 10$^8$ yr) stellar sources of Li, as well as those of low and high primordial Li. We sh…
We analyze 494 main sequence turnoff and subgiant stars from the AMBRE:HARPS survey. These stars have accurate astrometric information from \textit{Gaia}/DR1, providing reliable age estimates with relative uncertainties of $\pm1-2$ Gyr and allowing precise orbital determinations. The sample is split based on chemistry into a low-[Mg/Fe] sequence, which are often identified as thin disk stellar populations, and a high-[Mg/Fe] sequence, which are often associated with the thick disk. We find that the high-[Mg/Fe] chemical sequence has extended star formation for several Gyr and is coeval with th…
Sulfur is a volatile chemical element that plays an important role in tracing the chemical evolution of galaxies. However, its nucleosynthesis origin and abundance variations are still unclear. The goal of the present article is to accurately and precisely study the S-content of large number of stars located in the solar neighbourhood. We use the parametrisation of thousands of HR stellar spectra provided by the AMBRE Project, and combine it with the automated abundance determination GAUGUIN to derive LTE sulfur abundances for 1855 slow-rotating FGK-type stars. This is the largest and most pre…
The chemical evolution of lithium in the Milky Way represents a major problem in modern astrophysics. Indeed, lithium is, on the one hand, easily destroyed in stellar interiors, and, on the other hand, produced at some specific stellar evolutionary stages that are still not well constrained. The goal of this paper is to investigate the lithium stellar content of Milky Way stars in order to put constraints on the lithium chemical enrichment in our Galaxy, in particular in both the thin and thick discs. Thanks to high-resolution spectra from the ESO archive and high quality atmospheric parameter…
The aim of this paper is to characterise the abundance patterns of five iron-peak elements (Mn, Fe, Ni, Cu, and Zn) for which the stellar origin and chemical evolution are still debated. We automatically derived iron peak (Mn, Fe, Ni, Cu, and Zn) and alpha element (Mg) chemical abundances for 4666 stars. We used the bimodal distribution of [Mg/Fe] to chemically classify sample stars into different Galactic substructures: thin disc, metal-poor and high-alpha metal rich, high-alpha and low-alpha metal-poor populations. High-alpha and low-alpha metal-poor populations are fully distinct in Mg, Cu,…
The abundance of α-elements provides an important fossil signature in Galactic archaeology to trace the chemical evolution of the different disc populations. High-precision chemical abundances are crucial to improving our understanding of the chemodynamical properties present in the Galaxy. However, deriving precise abundance estimations in the metal-rich disc ([M/H] > 0 dex) is still challenging. The aim of this paper is to analyse different error sources affecting magnesium abundance estimations from optical spectra of metal-rich stars. We derived Mg abundances for 87522 high-resolution spec…
The Milky Way disk consists of two prominent components - a thick, alpha-rich, low-metallicity component and a thin, metal-rich, low-alpha component. External galaxies have been shown to contain thin and thick disk components, but whether distinct components in the [$α$/Fe]-[Z/H] plane exist in other Milky Way-like galaxies is not yet known. We present VLT-MUSE observations of UGC 10738, a nearby, edge-on Milky Way-like galaxy. We demonstrate through stellar population synthesis model fitting that UGC 10738 contains alpha-rich and alpha-poor stellar populations with similar spatial distributio…
In this work, we study the Galactic evolution of lithium by means of chemical evolution models in the light of the most recent spectroscopic data from Galactic stellar surveys. We consider detailed chemical evolution models for the Milky Way halo, discs and bulge, and we compare our model predictions with the most recent spectroscopic data for these different Galactic components. In particular, we focus on the decrease of lithium at high metallicity observed by the AMBRE Project, the Gaia-ESO Survey, and other spectroscopic surveys, which still remains unexplained by theoretical models. We ana…
In the Milky Way, the thick disk can be defined using individual stellar abundances, kinematics, or age; or geometrically, as stars high above the mid-plane. In nearby galaxies, where only a geometric definition can be used, thick disks appear to have large radial scale-lengths, and their red colors suggest that they are uniformly old. The Milky Way's geometrically thick disk is also radially extended, but it is far from chemically uniform: alpha-enhanced stars are confined within the inner Galaxy. In simulated galaxies, where old stars are centrally concentrated, geometrically thick disks are…
This article is based on our discussion session on Milky Way models at the 592 WE-Heraeus Seminar, Reconstructing the Milky Way's History: Spectroscopic Surveys, Asteroseismology and Chemodynamical models. The discussion focused on the following question: "Are there distinct thick and thin disks?". The answer to this question depends on the definition one adopts for thin and thick disks. The participants of this discussion converged to the idea that there are at least two different types of disks in the Milky Way. However, there are still important open questions on how to best define these tw…
We investigate thin and thick stellar disc formation in Milky-Way-mass galaxies using twelve FIRE-2 cosmological zoom-in simulations. All simulated galaxies experience an early period of bursty star formation that transitions to a late-time steady phase of near-constant star formation. Stars formed during the late-time steady phase have more circular orbits and thin-disc-like morphology at $z=0$, whilst stars born during the bursty phase have more radial orbits and thick-disc structure. The median age of thick-disc stars at $z=0$ correlates strongly with this transition time. We also find that…
We present a detailed analysis of kinematics of the Milky Way disk in solar neighborhood using GAIA DR3 catalog. To determine the local kinematics of the stellar disks of the Milky Way galaxy we use a complete sample of 278,228 red giant branch (RGB) stars distributed in a cylinder, centered at the Sun with a 1 kpc radius and half-height of 0.5 kpc. We determine separately the kinematical properties of RGB stars for each Galactic hemisphere in search for possible asymmetries. The kinematical properties of the RGB stars reveal the existence of two kinematically distinct components: the thin dis…
Revisiting the Radial Metallicity Gradient-Age Relation in the Milky Way's Thin and Thick Disks
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；National Astronomical Observatories, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院国家天文台）；Tianjin Normal University（天津师范大学）
We study the evolution of Milky Way thick and thin discs in the light of the most recent observational data. In particular, we analyze abundance gradients of O, N, Fe and Mg along the thin disc as well as the [Mg/Fe] vs. [Fe/H] relations and the metallicity distribution functions at different Galactocentric distances. We run several models starting from the two-infall paradigm, assuming that the thick and thin discs formed by means of two different infall episodes, and we explore several physical parameters, such as radial gas flows, variable efficiency of star formation, different times for t…
We present a semi-empirical, largely model-independent approach for estimating Galactic birth radii, r_birth, for Milky Way disk stars. The technique relies on the justifiable assumption that a negative radial metallicity gradient in the interstellar medium (ISM) existed for most of the disk lifetime. Stars are projected back to their birth positions according to the observationally derived age and [Fe/H] with no kinematical information required. Applying our approach to the AMBRE:HARPS and HARPS-GTO local samples, we show that we can constrain the ISM metallicity evolution with Galactic radiu…
In this work, two new axisymmetric models for the Galactic mass distribution are presented. Motivated by recent results, these two models include the contribution of a stellar thin disc and of a thick disc, as massive as the thin counterpart but with a shorter scale-length. Both models satisfy a number of observational constraints: stellar densities at the solar vicinity, thin and thick disc scale lengths and heights, rotation curve(s), and the absolute value of the perpendicular force Kz as a function of distance to the Galactic centre. We numerically integrate into these new models the motio…
We employ our Bayesian Machine Learning framework BINGO (Bayesian INference for Galactic archaeOlogy) to obtain high-quality stellar age estimates for 68,360 red giant and red clump stars present in the 17th data release of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the APOGEE-2 high-resolution spectroscopic survey. By examining the denoised age-metallicity relationship of the Galactic disc stars, we identify a drop in metallicity with an increase in [Mg/Fe] at an early epoch, followed by a chemical enrichment episode with increasing [Fe/H] and decreasing [Mg/Fe]. This result is congruent with the chemical…
Most of known RR Lyraes are type ab RR Lyraes (RRLab), and they are the excellent tool to map the Milky Way and its substructures. We find that 1148 RRLab stars determined by Drake et al.(2013) have been observed by spectroscopic surveys of SDSS and LAMOST. We derived radial velocity dispersion, circular velocity and mass profile from 860 halo tracers in our paper I. Here, we present the stellar densities and radial velocity distributions of thick disk and halo of the Milky Way. The 288 RRLab stars located in the thick disk have the mean metallicity of [Fe/H]$=-1.02$. Three thick disk tracers …
We analyse the chemical properties of a set of solar vicinity stars, and show that the small dispersion in abundances of α-elements at all ages provides evidence that the SFH has been uniform throughout the thick disk. In the context of long time scale infall models, we suggest that this result points either to a limited dependence of the gas accretion on the Galactic radius in the inner disk (R<10 kpc), or to a decoupling of the accretion history and star formation history due to other processes governing the ISM in the early disk, suggesting that infall cannot be a determining parameter of t…
In local disk galaxies such as our Milky Way, older stars generally inhabit a thicker disk than their younger counterparts. Two competing models have attempted to explain this result: one in which stars first form in thin disks that gradually thicken with time through dynamical heating, and one in which stars form in thick disks at early times and in progressively thinner disks at later times. We use a direct measure of the thicknesses of stellar disks at high redshift to discriminate between these scenarios. Using legacy HST imaging from the CANDELS and GOODS surveys, we measure the rest-opti…
We study the role of radial migration of stars on the chemical evolution of the Milky Way disk. In particular, we are interested in the impact of that process on the local properties of the disk (age-metallicity relation and its dispersion, metallicity distribution, evolution of abundance ratios) and on the morphological properties of the resulting thick and thin disks.We use a model with several new or up-dated ingredients: atomic and molecular gas phases, star formation depending on molecular gas, yields from the recent homogeneous grid provided by Nomoto et al. (2013), observationally infer…
We show that the bulge and the disk of the Milky Way (MW) at R$\lesssim$7~kpc are well described by a unique chemical evolution and a two-phase star-formation history (SFH). We argue that the populations within this inner disk, not the entire disk, are the same, and that the outer Lindblad resonance (OLR) of the bar plays a key role in explaining this uniformity. In our model of a two-phase star formation history, the metallicity, [$α$/Fe] and [$α$/H] distributions, and age-metallicity relation are all compatible with the observations of both the inner disk and bulge. The dip at [Fe/H]$\sim$0 …
The Spheroidal Bulge of the Milky Way: Chemodynamically Distinct from the Inner-Thick Disc and Bar
Leibniz-Institut für Astrophysik Potsdam (AIP)（波茨坦莱布尼茨天体物理研究所）；Universität Potsdam（波茨坦大学）；Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México（墨西哥国立自治大学）；Instituto de Astronomía, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México（墨西哥国立自治大学天文研究所）；Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias（加那利天体物理研究所）；Universidad de La Laguna（拉古纳大学）；Max Planck Institute for Astronomy（马克斯·普朗克天体物理研究所）；Universitat de Barcelona（巴塞罗那大学）；Institut de Ciències del Cosmos (ICCUB), Universitat de Barcelona（巴塞罗那大学宇宙科学研究所）；Institut d’Estudis Espacials de Catalunya (IEEC)（加泰罗尼亚空间研究学院）
I present examples of how chemo-dynamical N-body simulations can help understanding the structure and evolution of the inner Galaxy. Such simulations reproduce the observed links between kinematics, morphology and chemistry in the bar/bulge region and explain them by the self-consistent cohabitation of a number of components. Galactic archaeology, applied to simulation snapshots, explains the sequence in which the stars of the various components were formed. The thick disc stars form earlier than those of the thin disc and in a much shorter time scale. The bar in the thick disc is horizontally…
There is a long-standing debate on the origin of the metal-poor stellar populations of the Milky Way (MW) bulge, with the two leading scenarios being that these populations are either i) part of a classical metal-poor spheroid or ii) the same population as the chemically defined thick disc seen at the Solar neighbourhood. Here we test whether the latter scenario can reproduce the observed chemical properties of the MW bulge. To do so we compare an N-body simulation of a composite (thin+thick) stellar disc -- which evolves secularly to form a bar and a boxy/peanut (b/p) bulge -- to data from AP…
The Milky Way is a unique laboratory, where stellar properties can be measured and analyzed in detail. In particular, stars in the older populations encode information on the mechanisms that led to the formation of our Galaxy. In this article, we analyze the kinematics, spatial distribution, and chemistry of a large number of stars in the Solar Neighborhood, where all of the main Galactic components are well-represented. We find that the thick disk comprises two distinct and overlapping stellar populations, with different kinematic properties and chemical compositions. The metal-weak thick dis…
By analyzing a N-body simulation of a bulge formed simply via a bar instability mechanism operating on a kinematically cold stellar disk, and by comparing the results of this analysis with the structural and kinematic properties of the main stellar populations of the Milky Way bulge, we conclude that the bulge of our Galaxy is not a pure stellar bar formed from a pre-existing thin stellar disk, as some studies have recently suggested. On the basis of several arguments emphasized in this paper, we propose that the bulge population which, in the Milky Way, is observed not to be part of the peanu…
In this review I will discuss the comparison between model results and observational data for the Milky Way, the predictive power of such models as well as their limits. Such a comparison, known as Galactic archaeology, allows us to impose constraints on stellar nucleosynthesis and timescales of formation of the various Galactic components (halo, bulge, thick disk and thin disk).
[ABRIDGED] We determine Li abundances for a well-studied sample of 714 F and G dwarf, turn-off, and subgiant stars in the solar neighbourhood. The analysis is based on line synthesis of the Li line at 6707 Å in high-resolution and high signal-to-noise ratio echelle spectra, obtained with the MIKE, FEROS, SOFIN, UVES, and FIES spectrographs. The presented Li abundances are corrected for non-LTE effects. Out of the sample of 714 stars we are able to determine Li abundances for 420 stars and upper limits on the Li abundance for another 121 stars. 18 of the stars with well-determined Li abundances…
We present {complexity} of the Galactic outer disc {by fitting the stellar volume densities of the red giant branch stars with a two-disc component model}. {The discs are confirmed to} extend to $R\sim19$\,kpc. The radial density profile of the discs shows {two breaks at $R\sim11$ and $\sim14$\,kpc, respectively, which} separate the radial profile into three segments with different scale lengths of $2.12\pm0.26$, $1.18\pm0.08$, and $2.72$\,kpc at $R<11$, $11\leq R\leq14$, and $R>14$\,kpc, respectively. The first {break} is likely due to the sudden drop in the radial profile of the thin disc, w…
In the MW bulge, metal-rich stars form a strong bar and are more peanut-shaped than metal-poor stars. It has been recently claimed that this behavior is driven by the initial in-plane radial velocity dispersion of these populations, rather than by their initial vertical random motions. This has led to the suggestion that a thick disc is not necessary to explain the characteristics of the MW bulge. We rediscuss this issue by analyzing two dissipationless N-body simulations of boxy/peanut (b/p)-shaped bulges formed from composite stellar discs, made of kinematically cold and hot stellar populati…
Previous studies based on the analysis of Gaia DR2 data have revealed that accreted stars, possibly originating from a single progenitor satellite, are a significant component of the halo of our Galaxy, potentially constituting most of the halo stars at $\rm [Fe/H] < -1$ within a few kpc from the Sun and beyond. In this paper, we couple astrometric data from Gaia DR2 with elemental abundances from APOGEE DR14 to characterize the kinematics and chemistry of in-situ and accreted populations up to $\rm [Fe/H] \sim -2$. Accreted stars appear to significantly impact the Galactic chemo-kinematic rel…
We present a scenario of the chemical enrichment of the solar neighborhood that solves the G-dwarf problem by taking into account constraints on a larger scale. We argue that the Milky Way disk within 10 kpc has been enriched to solar metallicity by a massive stellar population: the thick disk, which itself formed from a massive turbulent gaseous disk. The key new consideration is that the pre-enrichment provided by the thick disk is not related to the mass fraction of this stellar population at the solar radius, as is classically assumed in inside-out scenarios, but is actually related to the…
