English

Inference from modelling the chemodynamical evolution of the Milky Way disc

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2018-02-26 v1

Abstract

In this thesis, the field star Initial Mass Function (IMF) and chemical evolution parameters for the Milky Way (MW) are derived using a forward modelling technique in combination with Bayesian statistics. Starting from a local MM disc model, observations of stellar samples in the Solar Neighbourhood are synthesised and compared to the corresponding volume-complete observational samples of Hipparcos stars. The resulting IMF, derived from observations in the range from 0.5 to 8Msun, is a two-slope broken power law with powers of -1.49 +- 0.08 and -3.02 +- 0.06 for the low-mass slope and the high-mass slope, respectively, with a break at 1.39 +- 0.05Msun. In order to constrain the IMF for stars more massive than 8Msun, a fast and flexible chemical enrichment code, Chempy, was developed, which is also able to reproduce spatial and stellar population selections of observational samples. The inferred high-mass slope for stellar masses above 6Msun is -2.28 +- 0.09, accounting for the systematic effects of different yield sets from the literature. This shows that constraints from chemical modelling, similarly to hydrodynamical simulations of the Galaxy, demand a Salpeter high-mass index. This is hard to recover from star count analysis given the rareness of high-mass stars.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1802.08432,
  title  = {Inference from modelling the chemodynamical evolution of the Milky Way disc},
  author = {Jan Rybizki},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1802.08432},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

Phd Thesis. Figures that could be useful for lectures in stellar astrophysics: 1.3, 2.10, 2.11, 4.1, 4.4, 4.5, 4.6. The thesis has overlap with the following publications: 2017A&A...605A..59R, 2015MNRAS.447.3880R, 2016AN....337..880J, 2015MNRAS.451..149J. A (slightly) higher resolution pdf can be obtained from this permanent link: http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bsz:16-heidok-199349