Time evolution of Ce as traced by APOGEE using giant stars observed with the Kepler, TESS and K2 missions

Abstract

Abundances of s-capture process elements in stars with exquisite asteroseismic, spectroscopic, and astrometric constraints offer a novel opportunity to study stellar evolution, nucleosynthesis, and Galactic chemical evolution. We aim to investigate one of the least studied s-process elements in the literature, Ce, using stars with asteroseismic constraints from the Kepler, K2 and TESS missions. We combine the global asteroseismic parameters derived from precise light curves obtained by the Kepler, K2 and TESS missions with chemical abundances from the APOGEE DR17 survey and astrometric data from the Gaia mission. Finally, we compute stellar ages using the code PARAM. We investigate the different trends of [Ce/Fe] as a function of [Fe/H], [alpha/Fe] and age considering the dependence on the radial position, specially in the case of K2 targets which cover a large Galactocentric range. We, finally, explore the [Ce/alpha] ratios as a function of age in different Galactocentric intervals. The studied trends display a strong dependence of the Ce abundances on [Fe/H] and star formation history. Indeed, the [Ce/Fe] ratio shows a non-monotonic dependence on [Fe/H] with a peak around -0.2 dex. Moreover, younger stars have higher [Ce/Fe] and [Ce/alpha] ratios than older stars, confirming the latest contribution of low- and intermediate-mass asymptotic giant branch stars to the Galactic chemical enrichment. In addition, the trends of [Ce/Fe] and [Ce/alpha] with age become steeper moving towards the outer regions of the Galactic disc, demonstrating a more intense star formation in the inner regions than in the outer regions. Ce is thus a potentially interesting element to help constraining stellar yields and the inside-out formation of the Milky Way disc. However, the large scatter in all the relations studied here, suggests that spectroscopic uncertainties for this element are still too large.

Accepted for publication in A&A, 18 pages, 18 figures

References in corpus (34)

• The Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite
• Estimating distances from parallaxes. V: Geometric and photogeometric distances to 1.47 billion stars in Gaia Early Data Release 3
• The K2 Mission: Characterization and Early results
• galpy: A Python Library for Galactic Dynamics
• Galactic chemical evolution: Carbon through Zinc
• Basic physical parameters of a selected sample of evolved stars
• Galactic Chemical Evolution and solar s-process abundances: dependence on the 13C-pocket structure
• Synthetic Stellar Photometry - I. General considerations and new transformations for broad-band systems
• High-precision abundances of elements in solar twin stars: Trends with stellar age and elemental condensation temperature
• The s process in massive stars at low metallicity. Effect of primary N14 from fast rotating stars
• The Gaia-ESO Public Spectroscopic Survey: Implementation, data products, open cluster survey, science, and legacy
• Abundance to age ratios in the HARPS-GTO sample with Gaia DR2: Chemical clocks for a range of [Fe/H]
• The Gaia-ESO Survey: the chemical structure of the Galactic discs from the first internal data release
• High-precision abundances of elements in solar-type stars. Evidence of two distinct sequences in abundance-age relations
• The AMBRE Project: chemical evolution models for the Milky Way thick and thin discs
• APOGEE DR16: a multi-zone chemical evolution model for the Galactic disc based on MCMC methods
• Explaining the Ba, Y, Sr, and Eu abundance scatter in metal-poor halo stars: constraints to the r-process
• The Gaia-ESO survey: the non-universality of the age-chemical-clocks-metallicity relations in the Galactic disc
• Synthetic Stellar Photometry - II. Testing the bolometric flux scale, and tables of bolometric corrections for the Hipparcos/Tycho, Pan-STARRS1, SkyMapper and JWST systems
• On the metallicity dependance of the [Y/Mg] - age relation for solar type stars
• The Open Cluster Chemical Abundances and Mapping Survey: VI. Galactic Chemical Gradient Analysis from APOGEE DR17
• Magnetic-buoyancy Induced Mixing in AGB Stars: Presolar SiC Grains
• BACCHUS Analysis of Weak Lines in APOGEE Spectra (BAWLAS)
• Prospects for Galactic and stellar astrophysics with asteroseismology of giant stars in the $TESS$ Continuous Viewing Zones and beyond
• The Gaia-ESO Survey: Age-chemical-clock relations spatially resolved in the Galactic disc
• Origin of $\alpha$-rich young stars: clues from C, N and O
• The [Y/Mg] clock works for evolved solar metallicity stars
• Exploring the s-process history in the Galactic disk: Cerium abundances and gradients in Open Clusters from the OCCAM/APOGEE sample
• Asteroseismology of the multiple stellar populations in the Globular Cluster M4
• Magnetic-buoyancy-induced mixing in AGB Stars: a theoretical explanation of the non-universal [Y/Mg]-age relation
• Modelling the chemical evolution of Zr, La, Ce and Eu in the Galactic discs and bulge
• The cerium content of the Milky Way as revealed by Gaia DR3 GSP-Spec abundances
• Abundance analysis of APOGEE spectra for 58 metal-poor stars from the bulge spheroid
• Testing abundance-age relations beyond solar analogues with Kepler LEGACY stars

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Spectroscopic age estimates for APOGEE red-giant stars: Precise spatial and kinematic trends with age in the Galactic disc
• Modelling chemical clocks -- Theoretical evidences of the space and time evolution of [s/alpha] in the Galactic disc with Gaia-ESO survey
• Chemical Cartography with APOGEE: Two-process Parameters and Residual Abundances for 288,789 Stars from Data Release 17
• A catalogue of asteroseismically calibrated ages for APOGEE DR17. The predictions of a CatBoost machine learning model based on the [Mg/Ce] chemical clock and other stellar parameters