English

Baade's window with APOGEE: Metallicities, ages and chemical abundances

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2017-03-22 v1 Solar and Stellar Astrophysics

Abstract

Baade's window (BW) is one of the most observed Galactic bulge fields in terms of chemical abundances. Due to its low and homogeneous interstellar absorption it is considered as a calibration field for Galactic bulge studies. In the era of large spectroscopic surveys, calibration fields such as BW are necessary to cross calibrate the stellar parameters and individual abundances of the APOGEE survey. We use the APOGEE BW stars to derive their metallicity distribution function (MDF) and individual abundances, for α\alpha- and iron-peak elements of the APOGEE ASPCAP pipeline (DR13), as well as the age distribution for stars in BW. We determine the MDF of APOGEE stars in BW and find a remarkable agreement with that of the Gaia-ESO survey (GES). Both exhibit a clear bimodal distribution. We also find that the Mg-metallicity planes of both surveys agree well, except for the metal-rich part ([Fe/H] >0.1), where APOGEE finds systematically higher Mg abundances with respect to the GES. The ages based on the [C/N] ratio reveal a bimodal age distribution, with a major old population at 10 Gyr, with a decreasing tail towards younger stars. A comparison between APOGEE estimates and stellar parameters, and those determined by other sources reveals detectable systematic offsets, in particular for spectroscopic surface gravity estimates. In general, we find a good agreement between individual abundances of O, Na, Mg, Al, Si, K, Ca, Cr, Mn, Co, and Ni from APOGEE with that of literature values. We have shown that in general APOGEE data show a good agreement in terms of MDF and individual chemical abundances with respect to literature works. Using the [C/N] ration we found a significant fraction of young stars in BW which is in agreement with the model of Haywood et al. (2016).

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1702.01547,
  title  = {Baade's window with APOGEE: Metallicities, ages and chemical abundances},
  author = {M. Schultheis and A. Rojas-Arriagada and A. E. García Pérez and H. Jönsson and M. Hayden and G. Nandakumar and K. Cunha and C. Allende Prieto and J. A. Holtzman and T. C. Beers and D. Bizyaev and J. Brinkmann and R. Carrera and R. E. Cohen and D. Geisler and F. R. Hearty and J. G. Fernández-Trincado and C. Maraston and D. Minniti and C. Nitschelm and A. Roman-Lopes and D. P. Schneider and B. Tang and S. Villanova and G. Zasowski and S. R. Majewski},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1702.01547},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

14 pages, 15 figure, accepted for Astronomy&Astrophysics