Hayden, Michael R. | Search NASA

DOE OSTI2022

Combined $\mathrm{APOGEE}$-$\mathrm{GALAH}$ stellar catalogues using the Cannon

APOGEE and GALAH are two high resolution multi-object spectroscopic surveys that provide fundamental stellar parameters and multiple elemental abundance estimates for about half a million stars in the Milky Way. Both surveys observe in different wavelength regimes and use different data reduction pipelines leading to significant offsets and trends in stellar parameters and abundances for the common stars observed in both surveys. Such systematic differences/offsets in stellar parameters and abundances make it difficult to effectively utilize them to investigate Galactic abundance trends in spite of the unique advantage provided by their complementary sky coverage and different Milky Way components they observe. Hence, we use the Cannon data-driven method selecting a training set of 4418 common stars observed by both surveys. This enables the construction of two catalogues, one with the APOGEE-scaled and the other with the GALAH-scaled stellar parameters. Using repeat observations in APOGEE and GALAH, we find high precision in metallicity (~0.02–0.4 dex) and alpha abundances (~0.02–0.03 dex) for spectra with good signal-to-noise ratio (SNR >; 80 for APOGEE and SNR > 40 for GALAH). We use open and globular clusters to validate our parameter estimates and find small scatter in metallicity (0.06 dex) and alpha abundances (0.03 dex) in APOGEE-scaled case. The final catalogues have been cross-matched with the Gaia EDR3 catalogue to enable their use to carry out detailed chemo-dynamic studies of the Milky Way from perspectives of APOGEE and GALAH.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗

DOE OSTI2021

Chemical enrichment and radial migration in the Galactic disc – the origin of the [αFe] double sequence

The ([α/Fe], [Fe/H]) distribution of Milky Way stars shows at least two distinct sequences, which have traditionally been associated with the thin and thick disc components. The abundance distribution varies systematically with location R and |z| across the Galaxy. We reproduce this using an analytical chemodynamical model that includes the effects of radial migration and kinematic heating. Unlike some earlier models, our scheme does not require a distinct thick disc component emerging from a separate evolutionary path. The proposed model has a continuous star formation history and a continuous age velocity dispersion relation. Moreover, [α/Fe] is constant for stellar ages less than 8 Gyr, but increases sharply for older stars over a time-scale of 1.5 Gyr. The gap between the two sequences is due to this sharp transition. We show that the high-[α/Fe] sequence at the low-metallicity end is simply a pile-up of old stars, but towards the high-metallicity end, the age progressively decreases and stars have small birth radii. Our model successfully explains the uniformity of the locus of the high-[α/Fe] sequence across different locations. The low-[α/Fe] sequence contains stars with different birth radii that owes its existence to radial migration. For the low-[α/Fe] stars, angular momentum is anticorrelated with [Fe/H], while the opposite is true for high-[α/Fe] stars. We show that the later trend can be explained by the increase of circular velocity with time. If radial migration is not included, the model fails to generate the double sequence and instead shows only a single sequence. Our simple scheme has major advantages over earlier chemodynamical models, as we show.

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS↗