English

Stellar yields and chemical evolution - The solar neighborhood as a calibrator

Astrophysics 2007-05-23 v1

Abstract

Uncertainties in stellar nucleosynthesis and their impact on models of chemical evolution are discussed. Comparing the Type II supernova nucleosynthesis prescriptions from Woosley & Weaver (1995) and Thielemann, Nomoto, & Hashimoto (1996), it turns out that the latter predict higher Mg/Fe ratios that are more favorable in reproducing the observed abundance features of the Milky Way. Provided that chemical evolution models are calibrated on the solar neighborhood, they offer a powerful tool to constrain structure formation. In particular, galaxy formation models that yield star formation histories significantly longer than 1 Gyr fail to reproduce the super-solar Mg/Fe ratios observed in elliptical galaxies.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.astro-ph/9912416,
  title  = {Stellar yields and chemical evolution - The solar neighborhood as a calibrator},
  author = {Daniel Thomas and Laura Greggio and Ralf Bender},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/9912416},
  year   = {2007}
}

Comments

6 pages, 2 figs., to appear in 'The chemical evolution of the Milky Way: stars vs clusters', F. Giovannelli & F. Matteucci, proceedings of the Vulcano Workshop, Sep. 1999