The homogeneity of the star forming environment of the Milky Way disk over time

Abstract

Stellar abundances and ages afford the means to link chemical enrichment to galactic formation. In the Milky Way, individual element abundances show tight correlations with age, which vary in slope across ([Fe/H]-[$\alpha$/Fe]). Here, we step from characterising abundances as measures of age, to understanding how abundances trace properties of stellar birth-environment in the disk over time. Using measurements from $\sim$27,000 APOGEE stars (R=22,500, SNR$>$200), we build simple local linear models to predict a sample of elements (X = Si, O, Ca, Ti, Ni, Al, Mn, Cr) using (Fe, Mg) abundances alone, as fiducial tracers of supernovae production channels. Given [Fe/H] and [Mg/H], we predict these elements, [X/H], to about double the uncertainty of their measurements. The intrinsic dispersion, after subtracting measurement errors in quadrature is $\approx 0.015-0.04$~dex. The residuals of the prediction (measurement $-$ model) for each element demonstrate that each element has an individual link to birth properties at fixed (Fe, Mg). Residuals from primarily massive-star supernovae (i.e. Si, O, Al) partially correlate with guiding radius. Residuals from primarily supernovae Ia (i.e. Mn, Ni) partially correlate with age. A fraction of the intrinsic scatter that persists at fixed (Fe, Mg), however, after accounting for correlations, does not appear to further discriminate between birth properties that can be traced with present-day measurements. Presumably, this is because the residuals are also, in part, a measure of the typical (in)-homogeneity of the disk's stellar birth environments, previously inferred only using open-cluster systems. Our study implies at fixed birth radius and time, there is a median scatter of $\approx 0.01-0.015$ dex in elements generated in supernovae sources.

submitted to ApJ, 16 pages, 12 figures

References in corpus (41)

• The GALAH Survey: Scientific Motivation
• The GALAH+ Survey: Third Data Release
• Riding the Spiral Waves: Implications of Stellar Migration for the Properties of Galactic Disks
• Evidence from the H3 Survey that the Stellar Halo is Entirely Comprised of Substructure
• High-precision abundances of elements in solar twin stars: Trends with stellar age and elemental condensation temperature
• Evidence from APOGEE for the presence of a major building block of the halo buried in the inner Galaxy
• Reconstructing the Last Major Merger of the Milky Way with the H3 Survey
• The Open Cluster Chemical Abundances and Mapping Survey: IV. Abundances for 128 Open Clusters using SDSS/APOGEE DR16
• Abundance to age ratios in the HARPS-GTO sample with Gaia DR2: Chemical clocks for a range of [Fe/H]
• The GALAH survey: tracing the Galactic disk with Open Clusters
• Timing the Early Assembly of the Milky Way with the H3 Survey
• SDSS-V: Pioneering Panoptic Spectroscopy
• Chemical Enrichment and Radial Migration in the Galactic Disk -- the origin of the [$\alpha /\mathrm{Fe}]$ Double Sequence
• The temporal evolution of neutron-capture elements in the Galactic discs
• APOGEE DR16: a multi-zone chemical evolution model for the Galactic disc based on MCMC methods
• The GALAH Survey: Chemical tagging and chrono-chemodynamics of accreted halo stars with GALAH+ DR3 and $Gaia$ eDR3
• The Gaia-ESO survey: the non-universality of the age-chemical-clocks-metallicity relations in the Galactic disc
• Chemical Abundances of Main-Sequence, Turnoff, Subgiant and red giant Stars from APOGEE spectra II: Atomic Diffusion in M67 Stars
• Measuring the mixing scale of the ISM within nearby spiral galaxies
• Metallicity Structure in the Milky Way Disk Revealed by Galactic HII Regions
• Chemical (in)homogeneity and atomic diffusion in the open cluster M67
• Abundance-age relations with red clump stars in open clusters
• The Similarity of Abundance Ratio Trends and Nucleosynthetic Patterns in the Milky Way Disk and Bulge
• How Many Elements Matter?
• Open Cluster Chemical Homogeneity Throughout the Milky Way
• The GALAH Survey: Chemical Clocks
• A bottom-heavy initial mass function for the likely-accreted blue-halo stars of the Milky Way
• The GALAH survey: Chemical homogeneity of the Orion complex
• The old, metal-poor, anticentre open cluster Trumpler 5
• LAMOST Spectral Survey
• Origin of metals in old Milky Way halo stars based on GALAH and Gaia
• Disentangled Representation Learning for Astronomical Chemical Tagging
• The consistency of chemical clocks among coeval stars
• Tracing birth properties of stars with abundance clustering
• Testing the chemical homogeneity of chemically tagged dissolved birth clusters
• An unsupervised method for identifying $X$-enriched stars directly from spectra: Li in LAMOST
• The Swan: Data-Driven Inference of Stellar Surface Gravities for Cool Stars from Photometric Light Curves
• The Astrophysical Variance in Gaia-RVS Spectra
• Stellar Migration and Chemical Enrichment in the Milky Way Disc: A Hybrid Model
• Inferring Galactic Parameters from Chemical Abundances: A Multi-Star Approach
• Modelling the chemical evolution of the Milky Way

Cited by in corpus (19)

• Unveiling the time evolution of chemical abundances across the Milky Way disk with APOGEE
• How Many Elements Matter?
• Chemical Cartography with APOGEE: Mapping Disk Populations with a Two-Process Model and Residual Abundances
• Reliability and limitations of inferring birth radii in the Milky Way disk
• A Swing of the Pendulum: The Chemodynamics of the Local Stellar Halo Indicate Contributions from Several Radial Merger Events
• Residual Abundances in GALAH DR3: Implications for Nucleosynthesis and Identification of Unique Stellar Populations
• Universal properties of the high- and low-α disk: small intrinsic abundance scatter and migrating stars
• The Gaia-ESO Survey: Chemical tagging in the thin disk. Open clusters blindly recovered in the elemental abundance space
• Chemical Cartography with APOGEE: Two-process Parameters and Residual Abundances for 288,789 Stars from Data Release 17
• Evolution of the radial ISM metallicity gradient in the Milky Way disk since redshift $\approx 3$
• The chemical enrichment of the Milky Way disk evaluated using conditional abundances
• Effects of secular growth and mergers on the evolution of metallicity gradients and azimuthal variations in a Milky Way-like galaxy
• A baseline on the relation between chemical patterns and birth stellar cluster
• Elemental Abundances of Kepler Objects of Interest in APOGEE DR17
• Solar twins in Gaia DR3 GSP-Spec I. Building a large catalog of Solar twins with ages
• Milky Way Mapper decoded abundances -- I. Shared disc enrichment patterns
• On the connection between nitrogen-enhanced field stars and the Galactic globular clusters
• Neutron-capture elements record the ordered chemical evolution of the disc over time
• PISP: Projected-Space Inference of Stellar Parameters