English

Characterising abundance-age relations of GALAH stars using oxygen-enhanced stellar models

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2023-05-24 v1 Solar and Stellar Astrophysics

Abstract

Main Sequence Turn-off stars (MSTO) and subgiant stars are good tracers of galactic populations. We present a study of 41,034 MSTO and subgiant stars from the GALAH survey. Using a grid of stellar models that accounts for the variation of O abundances, we determine their ages with a median age uncertainty of \sim9.4 per cent. Our analysis reveals that the ages of high-O stars based on O-enhanced models (OEM models) are smaller than those determined with α\alpha-enhanced models, resulting in a mean fractional age difference of -5.3 per cent at [O/α\alpha] = 0.2 and -11.0 per cent at [O/α\alpha] = 0.4. This age difference significantly impacts the age distribution of thick disc and halo stars, leading to a steeper downward trend in the [Fe/H]-age plane from 8 Gyr to 14 Gyr, indicating a shorter formation time-scale and a faster chemical-enhanced history for these populations. We confirm the V-shape of the normalized age-metallicity distribution pp(τ\tau\mid[Fe/H]) of thin disc stars, which is presumably a consequence of the second gas infall. Additionally, we find that the halo stars in our sample can be divided into two sequences, a metal-rich sequence (Splash stars) and a metal-poor sequence (accreted stars), with the Splash stars predominantly older than 9 Gyr and the accreted halo stars older than 10 Gyr. Finally, we observe two distinct sequences in the relations between various chemical abundances and age for disc stars, namely a young sequence with ages << \sim8 Gyr and an old sequence with ages >> \sim8 Gyr.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2305.09138,
  title  = {Characterising abundance-age relations of GALAH stars using oxygen-enhanced stellar models},
  author = {Tiancheng Sun and Xunzhou Chen and Shaolan Bi and Zhishuai Ge and Maosheng Xiang and Yaqian Wu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2305.09138},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

11 pages, 12 figures