Using heritability of stellar chemistry to reveal the history of the Milky Way

Abstract

Since chemical abundances are inherited between generations of stars, we use them to trace the evolutionary history of our Galaxy. We present a robust methodology for creating a phylogenetic tree, a biological tool used for centuries to study heritability. Combining our phylogeny with information on stellar ages and dynamical properties, we reconstruct the shared history of 78 stars in the Solar Neighbourhood. The branching pattern in our tree supports a scenario in which the thick disk is an ancestral population of the thin disk. The transition from thick to thin disk shows an anomaly, which we attribute to a star formation burst. Our tree shows a further signature of the variability in stars similar to the Sun, perhaps linked to a minor star formation enhancement creating our Solar System. In this paper, we demonstrate the immense potential of a phylogenetic perspective and interdisciplinary collaboration, where with borrowed techniques from biology we can study key processes that have contributed to the evolution of the Milky Way.

arXiv commentsubmitted to MNRAS. comments welcomed

References in corpus (68)

• Gaia Data Release 2. Summary of the contents and survey properties
• The merger that led to the formation of the Milky Way's inner stellar halo and thick disk
• The New Galaxy: Signatures of its Formation
• The mass distribution and gravitational potential of the Milky Way
• Radial Mixing in Galactic Discs
• Co-formation of the Galactic disc and the stellar halo
• The Chemical Evolution of the Galaxy: the two-infall model
• Galactic chemical evolution: Carbon through Zinc
• The Dawes Review 2: Nucleosynthesis and stellar yields of low and intermediate-mass single stars
• AGAMA: Action-based galaxy modelling architecture
• A dynamically young and perturbed Milky Way disk
• A Search for Stars of Very Low Metal Abundance. VI. Detailed Abundances of 313 Metal-Poor Stars
• Chemodynamical evolution of the Milky Way disk I: The solar vicinity
• Streams, substructures and the early history of the Milky Way
• The Biggest Splash
• On the typical timescale for the chemical enrichment from SNeIa in Galaxies
• High-precision abundances of elements in solar twin stars: Trends with stellar age and elemental condensation temperature
• Chemodynamical Simulations of the Milky Way Galaxy
• Spectroscopic determination of masses (and implied ages) for red giants
• Accuracy and precision of industrial stellar abundances
• The Chemical Homogeneity of Sun-like Stars in the Solar Neighborhood
• One large blob and many streams frosting the nearby stellar halo in Gaia DR2
• The Long-term Evolution of the Galactic Disk Traced by Dissolving Star Clusters
• On the origin of the chemical bimodality of disk stars: A tale of merger and migration
• Inflow, Outflow, Yields, and Stellar Population Mixing in Chemical Evolution Models
• Measuring Radial Orbit Migration in the Milky Way Disk
• Ages and kinematics of chemically selected, accreted Milky Way halo stars
• The origin and evolution of r- and s-process elements in the Milky Way stellar disk
• The Ages of the Thin Disk, Thick Disk, and the Halo from Nearby White Dwarfs
• Abundance to age ratios in the HARPS-GTO sample with Gaia DR2: Chemical clocks for a range of [Fe/H]
• Sausage & Mash: The dual origin of the Galactic thick disc and halo from the gas-rich Gaia-Enceladus-Sausage merger
• High-precision abundances of elements in solar-type stars. Evidence of two distinct sequences in abundance-age relations
• The GALAH survey: An abundance, age, and kinematic inventory of the solar neighbourhood made with TGAS
• r-Process Calculations and Galactic Chemical Evolution
• The Gaia-ESO Survey: radial distribution of abundances in the Galactic disc from open clusters and young field stars
• Signatures of SN Ia in the galactic thick disk
• Mergers, Starbursts, and Quenching in the Simba Simulation
• Chemical Enrichment and Radial Migration in the Galactic Disk -- the origin of the [$\alpha /\mathrm{Fe}]$ Double Sequence
• High-precision stellar abundances of the elements - methods and applications
• Accurate and homogeneous abundance patterns in solar-type stars of the solar neighbourhood: a chemo-chronological analysis
• The GALAH Survey: Non-LTE departure coefficients for large spectroscopic surveys
• Keeping it Cool: Much Orbit Migration, yet Little Heating, in the Galactic Disk
• Cannibals in the thick disk: the young $\alpha -$rich stars as evolved blue stragglers
• Two Disk Components from a Gas Rich Disk-Disk Merger
• Galactic Doppelganger: The chemical similarity among field stars and among stars with a common birth origin
• Dissecting stellar chemical abundance space with t-SNE
• The Gaia-ESO survey: the non-universality of the age-chemical-clocks-metallicity relations in the Galactic disc
• High-precision abundances of Sc, Mn, Cu, and Ba in solar twins. Trends of element ratios with stellar age
• High-precision abundances of elements in Kepler LEGACY stars. Verification of trends with stellar age
• Galactic Archaeology with asteroseismic ages. II. Confirmation of a delayed gas infall using Bayesian analysis based on MCMC methods
• Chemical evolution of the Milky Way: constraints on the formation of the thick and thin discs
• Heated Disc Stars in the Stellar Halo
• Revisiting long-standing puzzles of the Milky Way: the Sun and its vicinity as typical outer disk chemical evolution
• The effect of stellar migration on Galactic chemical evolution: a heuristic approach
• A Gaia-Enceladus Analog in the EAGLE Simulation: Insights into the Early Evolution of the Milky Way
• GRACES observations of young [alpha/Fe]-rich stars
• Cosmic phylogeny: reconstructing the chemical history of the solar neighbourhood with an evolutionary tree
• Differential abundances of open clusters and their tidal tails: chemical tagging and chemical homogeneity
• Abundances in the Milky Way across five nucleosynthetic channels from 4 million LAMOST stars
• The Gaia-ESO Survey: the selection function of the Milky Way field stars
• Strong chemical tagging with APOGEE: 21 candidate star clusters that have dissolved across the Milky Way disc
• ${\zeta }^2$ Ret, its debris disk, and its lonely stellar companion ${\zeta }^1$ Ret. Different $T_{\mathrm{c}}$ trends for different spectra
• Yule-Simpson's paradox in Galactic Archaeology
• A phylogenetic approach to chemical tagging. Reassembling open cluster stars
• Machine learning in APOGEE: Identification of stellar populations through chemical abundances
• Selection functions of large spectroscopic surveys
• seestar: Selection functions for spectroscopic surveys of the Milky Way
• Traits for chemical evolution in solar twins: Trends of neutron-capture elements with stellar age

Cited by in corpus (7)

• Searching for new solar twins: The Inti survey for the Northern Sky
• The consistency of chemical clocks among coeval stars
• Studying stellar populations in Omega Centauri with phylogenetics
• A baseline on the relation between chemical patterns and birth stellar cluster
• The Missing Link: Testing Galactic Chemical Evolution Models with the First Multi-Isotopic Abundances in Solar Twin Stars
• An ancient system hidden in the Galactic plane?
• Two sequences in the age-metallicity relation as seen from [C/N] abundances in APOGEE