A Cosmic Abundance Standard: Chemical Homogeneity of the Solar Neighborhood and the ISM Dust-Phase Composition

By N. Przybilla, M. Nieva, K. Butler. 2008

156 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A representative sample of unevolved early B-type stars in nearby OB associations and the field is analyzed to unprecedented precision using NLTE techniques. The resulting chemical composition is found to be more metal-rich and much more homogeneous than indicated by previous work. A rms scatter of ~10% in abundances is found for the six stars (and confirmed by six evolved stars), the same as reported for ISM gas-phase abundances. A cosmic abundance standard for the present-day solar neighborhood is proposed, implying mass fractions for hydrogen, helium, and metals of X = 0.715, Y = 0.271, and Z = 0.014. Good agreement with solar photospheric abundances as reported from recent 3D radiative-hydrodynamical simulations of the solar atmosphere is obtained. As a first application we use the cosmic abundance standard as a proxy for the determination of the local ISM dust-phase composition, putting tight observational constraints on dust models.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4be3fed7cae6586450eb0c3c6a559bea3709ad06

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Citations in the corpus

THE SPITZER ICE LEGACY: ICE EVOLUTION FROM CORES TO PROTOSTARS (2011, background): “The total (refractory + volatile) C, O and N abundances in the solar neighborhood are 2.1, 5.8 and 0.58×10−4 per hydrogen nucleus, respectively (Przybilla et al. 2008).”
Measuring Radial Orbit Migration in the Galactic Disk (2018, methodology): “While stars from the same cluster were manifestly born at the same epoch and the same Galactocentric radius, the approach in the present analysis makes a different assumption: that stars born at the same epoch at the same Galactocentric radius have very similar [Fe/H] (e.g., Przybilla et al. 2008).”
OPTICAL SPECTROSCOPY AND NEBULAR OXYGEN ABUNDANCES OF THE SPITZER/SINGS GALAXIES (2010, background): “However, this metallicity is ∼0.2–0.3 dex lower than the oxygen abundances of B-type stars in the solar neighborhood and in the Orion nebula (i.e., young stars within ∼1 kpc; Cunha et al. 2006; Przybilla et al. 2008; Simón-Dı́az 2010).”
SOLAR MODELS WITH ACCRETION. I. APPLICATION TO THE SOLAR ABUNDANCE PROBLEM (2011, background): “The same models lead to Zini values that are low when compared to metallicities observed in the solar neighborhood (see e.g. Przybilla et al. 2008).”
Present-day cosmic abundances - A comprehensive study of nearby early B-type stars and implications for stellar and Galactic evolution and interstellar dust models (2012, background): “…2008a; Tillich et al. 2009), the investigaion of subtle abundance signatures to constrain supernova nucleosynthesis from binary supernova runaways (Przybilla et al. 2008b; Irrgang et al. 2010), or on coupling quantitative spectroscopy with asteroseismic analysis of pulsating OB stars observedwith…”
Rotating massive main-sequence stars - I. Grids of evolutionary models and isochrones (2011, background): “The resulting metallicity of our Galactic mixture is Z = 0.0088, which is lower than the solar metallicity of Z = 0.012 found by Asplund et al. (2005) and the solar neighborhood metallicity of Z = 0.014 measured by Przybilla et al. (2008).”
The Lives of Stars: Insights from the TGAS–RAVE–LAMOST Data Set (2018, background): “The abundances of local, short lived O and B stars has been estimated to be between -0.07 and +0.03 dex (Nieva & Przybilla 2012, Przybilla et al. 2008), the abundance levels of red giants in open clusters around the solar radius is found to be between +0.1 and +0.2 dex (Frinchaboy et al. 2013), and…”
EXTRAGALACTIC CHEMICAL ABUNDANCES: DO H ii REGIONS AND YOUNG STARS TELL THE SAME STORY? THE CASE OF THE SPIRAL GALAXY NGC 300 (2009, background): “Recently Przybilla et al. (2008) measured the chemical composition of six early-B stars (luminosity classes III-V) in the solar neighbourhood (d < 500 pc), obtaining 12 + log(O/H) = 8.76± 0.03, which, compared with the diffuse ISM abundance, would imply an oxygen dust depletion of approximately…”