English

Sulfur isotope ratios in the Large Magellanic Cloud

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2023-11-08 v2

Abstract

Sulfur isotope ratios have emerged as a promising tool for tracing stellar nucleosynthesis, quantifying stellar populations, and investigating the chemical evolution of galaxies. While extensively studied in the Milky Way, in extragalactic environments they remain largely unexplored. We focus on investigating the sulfur isotope ratios in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) to gain insights into sulfur enrichment in this nearby system and to establish benchmarks for such ratios in metal-poor galaxies. We conducted pointed observations of CS and its isotopologues toward N113, one of the most prominent star-formation regions in the LMC, utilizing the Atacama Pathfinder EXperiment 12~m telescope. We present the first robust detection of C33^{33}S in the LMC by successfully identifying two C33^{33}S transitions on a large scale of \sim5 pc. Our measurements result in an accurate determination of the 34^{34}S/33^{33}S isotope ratio, which is 2.0±\pm0.2. Our comparative analysis indicates that the 32^{32}S/33^{33}S and 34^{34}S/33^{33}S isotope ratios are about a factor of 2 lower in the LMC than in the Milky Way. Our findings suggest that the low 34^{34}S/33^{33}S isotope ratio in the LMC can be attributed to a combination of the age effect, low metallicity, and star formation history.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2309.15155,
  title  = {Sulfur isotope ratios in the Large Magellanic Cloud},
  author = {Y. Gong and C. Henkel and K. M. Menten and C. -H. R. Chen and Z. Y. Zhang and Y. T. Yan and A. Weiss and N. Langer and J. Z. Wang and R. Q. Mao and X. D. Tang and W. Yang and Y. P. Ao and M. Wang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2309.15155},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

6 pages, 1 figures, 2 tables, accepted for publication in A&A, adjusted to the final version

R2 v1 2026-06-28T12:33:03.331Z