The Similarity of Abundance Ratio Trends and Nucleosynthetic Patterns in the Milky Way Disk and Bulge
Emily Griffith, David H. Weinberg, Jennifer A. Johnson, Rachael Beaton, D. A. García-Hernández, Sten Hasselquist, Jon Holtzman, James W. Johnson, Henrik Jönsson… 展开作者
Emily Griffith, David H. Weinberg, Jennifer A. Johnson, Rachael Beaton, D. A. García-Hernández, Sten Hasselquist, Jon Holtzman, James W. Johnson, Henrik Jönsson, Richard R. Lane, David M. Nataf, Alexandre Roman-Lopes
We compare abundance ratio trends in a sample of $\sim 11,000$ Milky Way bulge stars ($R_{\rm GC} < 3$ kpc) from the Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment (APOGEE) to those of APOGEE stars in the Galactic disk ($5$ kpc $< R_{\rm GC} < 11$ kpc). We divide each sample into low-Ia (high-[Mg/Fe]) and high-Ia (low-[Mg/Fe]) populations, and in each population we examine the median trends of [X/Mg] vs. [Mg/H] for elements X = Fe, O, Na, Al, Si, P, S, K, Ca, V, Cr, Mn, Co, Ni, Cu, and Ce. To remove small systematic trends of APOGEE abundances with stellar $\log(g)$, we resample the disk stars to match the $\log(g)$ distributions of the bulge data. After doing so, we find nearly identical median trends for low-Ia disk and bulge stars for all elements. High-Ia trends are similar for most elements, with noticeable (0.05-0.1 dex) differences for Mn, Na, and Co. The close agreement of abundance trends (with typical differences $\lesssim 0.03$ dex) implies that similar nucleosynthetic processes enriched bulge and disk stars despite the different star formation histories and physical conditions of these regions. For example, we infer that differences in the high mass slope of the stellar initial mass function (IMF) between disk and bulge must have been $\lesssim 0.30$. This agreement, and the generally small scatter about the median sequences, means that one can predict all of a bulge star's APOGEE abundances with good accuracy knowing only its measured [Mg/Fe] and [Mg/H] and the observed trends of disk stars.
Large stellar surveys are revealing the chemodynamical structure of the Galaxy across a vast spatial extent. However, the many millions of low-resolution spectra observed to date are yet to be fully exploited. We employ The Cannon, a data-driven approach to estimating abundances, to obtain detailed abundances from low-resolution (R = 1800) LAMOST spectra, using the GALAH survey as our reference. We deliver five (for dwarfs) or six (for giants) estimated abundances representing five different nucleosynthetic channels, for 3.9 million stars, to a precision of 0.05 - 0.23 dex. Using wide binary p…
The assembly of the Milky Way bulge is an old topic in astronomy, one now in a period of renewed and rapid development. The dominant scenario for bulge formation is that of the Milky Way as a nearly pure disk galaxy, with the inner disk having formed a bar and buckled. This can potentially explain virtually all bulge stars with [Fe/H] <~ -1.0, comprising 95% of the stellar population. The evidence is the incredible success in N-body models of this type in making meaningful predictions, such as the rotation curve and velocity dispersion measured from radial velocities, and the spatial morpholog…
The first stars are predicted to have formed within 200 million years after the Big Bang, initiating the cosmic dawn. A true first star has not yet been discovered, although stars with tiny amounts of elements heavier than helium ('metals') have been found in the outer regions ('halo') of the Milky Way. The first stars and their immediate successors should, however, preferentially be found today in the central regions ('bulges') of galaxies, because they formed in the largest over-densities that grew gravitationally with time. The Milky Way bulge underwent a rapid chemical enrichment during th…
I review the literature covering the issue of interstellar extinction toward the Milky Way bulge, with emphasis placed on findings from planetary nebulae, RR Lyrae, and red clump stars. I also report on observations from HI gas and globular clusters. I show that there has been substantial progress in this field in recent decades, most particularly from red clump stars. The spatial coverage of extinction maps has increased by a factor $\sim 100 \times$ in the past twenty years, and the total-to-selective extinction ratios reported have shifted by $\sim$20-25\%, indicative of the improved accura…
The age and chemical characteristics of the Galactic bulge link to the formation and evolutionary history of the Galaxy. Data-driven methods and large surveys enable stellar ages and precision chemical abundances to be determined for vast regions of the Milky Way, including the bulge. Here, we use the data-driven approach of The Cannon, to infer the ages and abundances for 125,367 stars in the Milky Way, using spectra from Apache Point Observatory Galaxy Evolution Experiment (APOGEE) DR14. We examine the ages and metallicities of 1654 bulge stars within $R_{\text{GAL}}<3.5$ kpc. We focus on fi…
The evolution of C and O abundances in the Milky Way can impose strong constraints on stellar nucleosynthesis and help understanding the formation and evolution of our Galaxy. The aim is to review the measured C and O abundances in the disk and bulge of the Galaxy and compare them with model predictions. We adopt two successful chemical evolution models for the bulge and the disk, which assume the same nucleosynthesis prescriptions but different histories of star formation. The data show a clear distinction between the trend of [C/O] in the thick and thin Galactic disks, while the thick disk a…
The nuclear bulge is a region with a radius of about 200 parsecs around the centre of the Milky Way. It contains stars with ages ranging from a few million years to over a billion years, yet its star-formation history and the triggering process for star formation remain to be resolved. Recently, episodic star formation, powered by changes in the gas content, has been suggested. Classical Cepheid variable stars have pulsation periods that decrease with increasing age, so it is possible to probe the star-formation history on the basis of the distribution of their periods. Here we report the pres…
The distance to the Galactic center inferred from OGLE RR Lyrae variables observed in the direction of the bulge is Ro=8.1+-0.6 kpc. An accurate determination of Ro is hindered by countless effects that include an ambiguous extinction law, a bias for smaller values of Ro because of a preferential sampling of variable stars toward the near side of the bulge owing to extinction, and an uncertainty in characterizing how a mean distance to the group of variable stars relates to Ro. A VI-based period-reddening relation for RR Lyrae variables is derived to map extinction throughout the bulge. The re…
New abundances of planetary nebulae located towards the bulge of the Galaxy are derived based on observations made at LNA (Brazil). We present accurate abundances of the elements He, N, S, O, Ar, and Ne for 56 PNe located towards the galactic bulge. The data shows a good agreement with other results in the literature, in the sense that the distribution of the abundances is similar to those works. From the statistical analysis performed, we can suggest a bulge-disk interface at 2.2 kpc for the intermediate mass population, marking therefore the outer border of the bulge and inner border of the …
The stellar population of the Milky Way bulge is thoroughly studied, with a plethora of measurements from virtually the full suite of instruments available to astronomers. It is thus perhaps surprising that alongside well-established results lies some substantial uncertainty in its star-formation history. Cosmological models predict the bulge to host the Galaxy's oldest stars for [Fe/H]$\lesssim -1$, and this is demonstrated by RR Lyrae stars and globular cluster observations. There is consensus that bulge stars with [Fe/H]$\lesssim0$ are older than $t \approx10$ Gyr. However, at super-solar m…
We conduct a quantitative analysis of the star formation history (SFH) of the Milky Way's bulge by exploiting the constraining power of its stellar [Fe/H] and [Mg/Fe] distribution functions. Using APOGEE data, we confirm the previously-established bimodal [Mg/Fe]--[Fe/H] distribution within 3 kpc of the inner Galaxy. Compared to that in the solar vicinity, the high-$α$ population in the bulge peaks at a lower [Fe/H]. To fit these observations, we use a simple but flexible star formation framework, which assumes two distinct stages of gas accretion and star formation, and systematically evaluat…
Stars with unusual elemental abundances offer clues about rare astrophysical events or nucleosynthetic pathways. Stars with significantly depleted magnesium and enhanced potassium ([Mg/Fe] < -0.5; [K/Fe] > 1) have to date only been found in the massive globular cluster NGC 2419 and, to a lesser extent, NGC 2808. The origin of this abundance signature remains unknown, as does the reason for its apparent exclusivity to these two globular clusters. Here we present 112 field stars, identified from 454,180 LAMOST giants, that show significantly enhanced [K/Fe] and possibly depleted [Mg/Fe] abundanc…
The latest edition of the APOGEE-2/DR14 survey catalogue and the first \texttt{Payne} data release of APOGEE abundance determinations by Ting et al. are examined. We identify 31 previously unremarked metal-poor giant stars with anomalously high levels of nitrogen in the chemical space defined by [Fe/H] and [N/Fe]. The APOGEE chemical abundance patterns of such objects revealed that these are chemically distinct from the Milky Way (MW) in most chemical elements. We have found all these objects have a [N/Fe]$>+0.5$, and are thus identified here as nitrogen-rich stars. An orbital analysis of thes…
Recent observational programmes are providing a global view of the Milky Way bulge that serves as template for detailed comparison with models and extragalactic bulges. A number of surveys (i.e. VVV, GIBS, GES, ARGOS, BRAVA, APOGEE) are producing comprehensive and detailed extinction, metallicity, kinematics and stellar density maps of the Galactic bulge with unprecedented accuracy. However, the still missing key ingredient is the distribution of stellar ages across the bulge. To overcome this limitation, we aim to age-date the stellar population in several bulge fields with the ultimate goal …
The separation of oxygen- and carbon-rich AGB sources is crucial for their accurate use as local and cosmological distance and age/metallicity indicators. We investigate the use of unsupervised learning algorithms for classifying the chemistry of long-period variables from Gaia DR3's BP/RP spectra. Even in the presence of significant interstellar dust, the spectra separate into two groups attributable to O-rich and C-rich sources. Given these classifications, we utilise a supervised approach to separate O-rich and C-rich sources without BP/RP spectra but instead given broadband optical and inf…
In order to characterize 22 new globular cluster (GC) candidates in the Galactic bulge, we present their colour-magnitude diagrams (CMDs) and Ks-band luminosity functions (LFs) using the near-infrared VVV database as well as Gaia-DR2 proper motion dataset. CMDs were obtained, on one hand, after properly decontaminating the observed diagrams from background/foreground disc stars and other sources. On the other hand, CMDs were also obtained based upon star selection in proper motion diagrams. Taking into account our deep CMDs and LFs analyses, we find that 17 out of 22 new GC candidates may be r…
We present an analysis of high latitude $δ$ Scuti stars ($\left|b\right|> 1^{\circ}$) in the Galactic bulge region ($-8^{\circ}.3< l<9^{\circ}.4$) using a clean sample of the photometric data of $7,440$ stars recently released by the OGLE-IV project. The geometrical parameters of the bulge are determined based on Maximum Likelihood (ML) analysis in five-dimensional parameter space. More refined values of these parameters as well as their uncertainties are obtained from a fully Bayesian Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) analysis. Approximating the bulge as an ellipsoid, the distribution of the nu…
Ancient relic moderately metal-rich bulge cluster Tonantzintla 2
Università di Padova（帕多瓦大学）；Centro di Ateneo di Studi e Attività Spaziali “Giuseppe Colombo”（朱塞佩·科隆博大学中心太空研究与活动研究中心）；INAF-Osservatorio di Padova（意大利国家天体物理研究所帕多瓦天文台）；Max Planck Institute for Astronomy（马克斯·普朗克天文学研究所）；Universidade de São Paulo, IAG（圣保罗大学天文学、地球科学与 geodesy 学院）；Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul（南里奥格兰德联邦大学）；Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics（莱布尼茨天体物理研究所）；Universidad Católica del Norte, Núcleo UCN en Arqueología Galáctica - Inst. de Astronomía（北天主教大学银河考古核心-天文学研究所）
The populations of bright planetary nebulae in the discs of spirals appear to differ in their spectral properties from those in ellipticals and the bulges of spirals. The bright planetary nebulae from the bulge of the Milky Way are entirely compatible with those observed in the discs of spiral galaxies. The similarity might be explained if the bulge of the Milky Way evolved secularly from the disc, in which case the bulge should be regarded as a pseudo-bulge.
We model the split red clump of the Galactic bulge in OGLE-III photometry, and compare the results to predictions from two N-body models. Our analysis yields precise maps of the brightness of the two red clumps, the fraction of stars in the more distant peak, and their combined surface density. We compare the observations to predictions from two N-body models previously used in the literature. Both models correctly predict several features as long as one assumes an angle $α_{\rm{Bar}} \approx 30^{\circ}$ between the Galactic bar's major axis and the line of sight to the Galactic centre. In par…
We demonstrate that failure to properly account for stellar evolution can bias results in determinations of the spatial morphology of Galactic bulge stars, focusing on the question of whether or not the X-shape is more pronounced among the more metal-rich stars than among the metal-poor stars. We argue that this trend, a result recently claimed by three separate groups, may have been overestimated as it is relatively easier to detect a bimodality in the distance distribution function at higher metallicities. This is due to three factors. First, the intrinsic colour of red clump and red giant s…
Metal-poor stars in the Milky Way are local relics of the epoch of the first stars and the first galaxies. However, a low metallicity does not prove that a star formed in this ancient era, as metal-poor stars form over a range of redshift in different environments. Theoretical models of Milky Way formation have shown that at constant metallicity, the oldest stars are those closest to the center of the Galaxy on the most tightly-bound orbits. For that reason, the most metal-poor stars in the bulge of the Milky Way provide excellent tracers of the chemistry of the high-redshift universe. We repo…
It has been suggested that the oldest stellar populations in the Milky Way Galaxy are tightly bound and confined to the central regions of the Galaxy. This is one of the reasons why a handful of globular clusters located in the bulge region are thought to be remnants of the primeval formation stages of the Milky Way. The globular cluster, ESO 456-SC38 (Djorgovski~2) is one such cluster; it has a blue horizontal branch, is projected very close to the center of the Galaxy, and has an orbit confining it to the bulge/bar region. The first alpha abundances of seven stars in this heavily reddened cl…
The bulge is the oldest component of the Milky Way. Since numerous simulations of Milky Way formation have predicted that the oldest stars at a given metallicity are found on tightly bound orbits, the Galaxy's oldest stars are likely metal-poor stars in the inner bulge with small apocenters (i.e., $R_{\mathrm{apo}}\lesssim4$ kpc). In the past, stars with these properties have been impossible to find due to extreme reddening and extinction along the line of sight to the inner bulge. We have used the mid-infrared metal-poor star selection of Schlaufman & Casey (2014) on Spitzer/GLIMPSE data to o…
Three dimensional interstellar extinction maps provide a powerful tool for stellar population analysis. We use data from the VISTA Variables in the Via Lactea survey together with the Besançon stellar population synthesis model of the Galaxy to determine interstellar extinction as a function of distance in the Galactic bulge covering $ -10 < l < 10$ and $-10 < b <5$. We adopted a recently developed method to calculate the colour excess. First we constructed the H-Ks vs. Ks and J-Ks vs. Ks colour-magnitude diagrams based on the VVV catalogues that matched 2MASS. Then, based on the temperature-c…
The characteristics of the stellar populations in the Galactic Bulge inform and constrain the Milky Way's formation and evolution. The metal-poor population is particularly important in light of cosmological simulations, which predict that some of the oldest stars in the Galaxy now reside in its center. The metal-poor bulge appears to consist of multiple stellar populations that require dynamical analyses to disentangle. In this work, we undertake a detailed chemodynamical study of the metal-poor stars in the inner Galaxy. Using R$\sim$ 20,000 VLT/GIRAFFE spectra of 319 metal-poor (-2.55 dex$\…
The Two-infall Model Revisited: Constraints on Milky Way Bulge Assembly from >30,000 Galactic Chemical Evolution Models and Machine Learning
University of Wyoming（怀俄明大学）；Space Telescope Science Institute（太空望远镜科学研究所）；Department of Astronomy, University of Florida（佛罗里达大学天文学系）；University of Bayreuth（拜罗伊特大学）；Konkoly Observatory, HUN-REN Research Centre for Astronomy and Earth Sciences（孔科利天文台，匈牙利研究与教育网络地球与天文学研究中心）；CSFK, MTA Centre of Excellence（CSFK，匈牙利科学院卓越中心）；Department of Physics and Astronomy, UCLA（加州大学洛杉矶分校物理与天文学系）
We study the line widths in the [\ion{O}{3}]$λ$5007 and H$α$ lines for two groups of planetary nebulae in the Milky Way bulge based upon spectroscopy obtained at the Observatorio Astronómico Nacional in the Sierra San Pedro Mártir (OAN-SPM) using the Manchester Echelle Spectrograph. The first sample includes objects early in their evolution, having high H$β$ luminosities, but [\ion{O}{3}]$λ5007/\mathrm Hβ< 3$. The second sample comprises objects late in their evolution, with \ion{He}{2} $λ4686/\mathrm Hβ> 0.5$. These planetary nebulae represent evolutionary phases preceeding and following thos…
Recent wide-area surveys have enabled us to study the Milky Way with unprecedented detail. Its inner regions, hidden behind dust and gas, have been partially unveiled with the arrival of near-IR photometric and spectroscopic datasets. Among recent discoveries, there is a population of low-mass globular clusters, known to be missing, especially towards the Galactic bulge. In this work, five new low-luminosity globular clusters located towards the bulge area are presented. They were discovered by searching for groups in the multi-dimensional space of coordinates, colours, and proper motions from…
We characterize the population of blue horizontal-branch (BHB) stars in the bulge-halo transition region of the Milky Way using the VISTA Variables in the Vía Láctea (VVV) ESO Public Survey data. The selection of BHB stars is made using the globular cluster M22 as a reference standard, and constructing color-magnitude and color-color diagrams with specific cuts in the $ZYJHK_s$ near-infrared (IR) passbands. A total of 12,554 BHB stars were detected, in a region within $-10.0^{\circ} \leq \ell \leq 10.2^{\circ}$ and $-10.2^{\circ} \leq b \leq -8.0^{\circ}$. We provide accurate coordinates and n…
We present an analysis of the period-$V$-amplitude plane for RR0 Lyrae stars (fundamental mode pulsators) with "normal" light curves in the bulge using the MACHO bulge fields. Although bulge globular clusters have RR Lyraes that divide into two reasonable distinct groups according to the average period of the RR0 Lyraes (Oosterhoff 1939), there is no evidence of a gap between Oosterhoff I and II stars in the bulge field star sample. The majority of the bulge RR0 Lyrae field star population have a difference in period compared to the Oosterhoff I cluster M3 (Delta log P) that is shifted by abou…
