The Gaia-ESO Survey: Probing the lithium abundances in old metal-rich dwarf stars in the Solar vicinity

Abstract

We test a scenario in which radial migration could affect the Li abundance pattern of dwarf stars in the solar neighbourhood. This may confirm that the Li abundance in these stars can not serve as a probe for the Li abundance in the interstellar medium. We use the high-quality data (including Li abundances) from the 6th internal Data Release of the Gaia-ESO survey. In this sample, we group stars by similarity in chemical abundances via hierarchical clustering. Our analysis treats both measured Li abundances and upper limits. The Li envelope of the previously identified radially migrated stars is well below the benchmark meteoritic value (<3.26 dex); the star with the highest detected abundance has A(Li) = 2.76 dex. This confirms the previous trends observed for old dwarf stars (median ages $\sim$ 8 Gyr), where Li decreases for [Fe/H]$\gtrsim$0. This result acts as supporting evidence that the abundance of Li measured in the upper envelope of old dwarf stars should not be considered a proxy for the interstellar medium Li. Our scenario also indicates that the stellar yields for [M/H]>0 should not be decreased, as recently proposed in the literature. Our study backs the recent studies that claimed that old dwarfs on the hot side of the dip are efficient probes of the ISM abundance of Li, provided atomic diffusion does not lower significantly the initial Li abundance in the atmospheres of metal-rich objects.

8 pages, 3 figures. Abridged abstract to fit ArXiv's requirements. Letter published in A&A Letters. Version after the language proofs

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• The Gaia-ESO Survey: Preparing the ground for 4MOST & WEAVE galactic surveys. Chemical evolution of lithium with machine learning
• Evolution of lithium in the disc of the Galaxy and the role of novae
• The role of radial migration on tracing lithium evolution in the Galactic disk
• Probing the origins. I. Generalised Additive Model inference of birth radii for Milky Way stars in the solar vicinity
• Searching for the nature of stars with debris disks and planets