Galactic Cosmochronometry from Radioactive Elements in the Spectra of Very Old Metal-Poor Stars

Abstract

In a short review of neutron-capture elemental abundances in Galactic halo stars, emphasis is placed on the use of these elements to estimate the age of the Galactic halo. Two prominent characteristics of neutron-capture elements in halo stars are their large star-to-star scatter in the overall abundance level with respect to lighter elements, and the dominance of r-process abundance patterns at lowest stellar metallicities. The r-process abundance signature potentially allows the direct determination of the age of the earliest Galactic halo nucleosynthesis events, but further developments in r-process theory, high resolution spectroscopy of very metal-poor stars, and in basic atomic data are needed to narrow the uncertainties in age estimates. Attention is brought to the importance of accurate transition probabilities in neutron-capture element cosmochronometry. Recent progress in the transition probabilities of rare earth elements is discussed, along with suggestions for future work on other species.

19 pages, 5 figures; To appear in Physica Scripta

References in corpus (3)

• Neutron-Capture Elements in the Early Galaxy: Insights from a Large Sample of Metal-Poor Giants
• The r-Process Enriched Low Metallicity Giant HD 115444
• Th Ages for Metal-Poor Stars

Cited by in corpus (5)

• The Solar Neighborhood XXXVII: The Mass-Luminosity Relation for Main Sequence M Dwarfs
• A study of the s-process in the carbon-rich post-AGB stars IRAS06530-0213 and IRAS08143-4406 on the basis of VLT-UVES spectra
• Galaxy Genesis -- unravelling the epoch of dissipation in the early disk
• Observations of Neutron-Capture Elements in the Early Galaxy
• A chemodynamical analysis of bright metal-poor stars from the HESP-GOMPA survey -- Indications of a non-prevailing site for light r-process elements