The Gaia-ESO Survey: α-abundances of metal-poor stars

Abstract

We performed a detailed study of the ratio of low-α to high-α stars in the Galactic halo as observed by the Gaia-ESO Survey. Using a sample of 381 metal-poor stars from the second internal data release, we found that the value of this ratio did not show evidence of systematic trends as a function of metallicity, surface gravity, Galactic latitude, Galactic longitude, height above the Galactic plane, and Galactocentric radius. We conclude that the α-poor/α-rich value of 0.28 $\pm$ 0.08 suggests that in the inner halo, the larger portion of stars were formed in a high star formation rate environment, and about 15% of the metal-poor stars originated from much lower star formation rate environments.

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Cited by in corpus (4)

• The Gaia-ESO Public Spectroscopic Survey: Implementation, data products, open cluster survey, science, and legacy
• Disentangling the Galactic Halo with APOGEE: I. Chemical and Kinematical Investigation of Distinct Metal-Poor Populations
• Building Blocks of the Milky Way's Accreted Spheroid
• Photometric Calibration of the $[\alpha /$Fe] Element: II. Calibration with SDSS Photometry