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.

submitted to MNRAS. comments welcomed

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• 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