English

Revisiting the near infrared Calcium triplet as metallicity indicator

Solar and Stellar Astrophysics 2026-02-04 v1 Astrophysics of Galaxies

Abstract

The near-infrared Calcium II Triplet (CaT), around 850nm, is a key metallicity indicator for red giant stars. We present a revised [Fe/H] calibration as a function of CaT line strengths and four luminosity indicators, including the GaiaGaia GG-band, together with the classical VV, II, and KsK_s bandpasses. For this purpose, we used a sample of 366 red giant stars belonging to 25 globular and open clusters, complemented by 52 extremely metal-poor field giant stars. The CaT line strengths are determined by fitting Gaussian-Lorentzian combination profiles using the Python lmfit package, which utilises the algorithms implemented therein. The derived calibration is valid for a wide metallicity range, 4-4\,dex[Fe/H]+0.15 \lesssim \mathrm{[Fe/H]} \lesssim +0.15, and for ages older than \sim200 Myr. In addition, we performed a detailed assessment of how factors such as spectral resolution, spectral quality (expressed through the signal-to-noise ratio), and the algorithms used to constrain the line profiles affect the measured line strengths and the resulting metallicities.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2512.20574,
  title  = {Revisiting the near infrared Calcium triplet as metallicity indicator},
  author = {M. Navabi and R. Carrera and N. E. D. Noël and C. Gallart and E. Pancino and M. De Leo},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.20574},
  year   = {2026}
}