The Gaia-ESO Survey : radial metallicity gradients and age-metallicity relation of stars in the Milky Way disk

By M. Bergemann, G. Ruchti, A. Serenelli, S. Feltzing, A. Alves-Brito, Martin Asplund, T. Bensby, P. Gruiters, U. Heiter, A. Hourihane and 37 more. 2014

142 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We study the relationship between age, metallicity, and alpha-enhancement of FGK stars in the Galactic disk. The results are based upon the analysis of high-resolution UVES spectra from the Gaia-ESO large stellar survey. We explore the limitations of the observed dataset, i.e. the accuracy of stellar parameters and the selection effects that are caused by the photometric target preselection. We find that the colour and magnitude cuts in the survey suppress old metal-rich stars and young metal-poor stars. This suppression may be as high as 97% in some regions of the age-metallicity relationship. The dataset consists of 144 stars with a wide range of ages from 0.5 Gyr to 13.5 Gyr, Galactocentric distances from 6 kpc to 9.5 kpc, and vertical distances from the plane 0 9 Gyr is not as small as advocated by some other studies. In agreement with earlier work, we find that radial abundance gradients change as a function of vertical distance from the plane. The [Mg/Fe] gradient steepens and becomes negative. In addition, we show that the inner disk is not only more alpha-rich compared to the outer disk, but also older, as traced independently by the ages and Mg abundances of stars.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/751e00acd8293d85769261a9c04ac88032eee9e9

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. Hans-Walter Rix
2. Jo Bovy
3. I. Minchev
4. Martin Asplund
5. Timothy C. Beers
6. C. Chiappini
7. C. Conroy
8. A. Helmi

In Instrumentation

1. Hans-Walter Rix
2. I. Minchev
3. Jo Bovy
4. A. Helmi
5. C. Conroy
6. D. Huber
7. Joss Bland-Hawthorn
8. O. Gerhard

Citations in the corpus

• Measuring the vertical age structure of the Galactic disc using asteroseismology and SAGA (2015, result): “…as already derived from turn-off and subgiant stars in the solar neighbourhood (e.g. Nordström et al. 2004; Haywood 2008; Casagrande et al. 2011; Bergemann et al. 2014) and MNRAS 455, 987–1007 (2016) pril 10, 2016 also in agreement with the study of Galactic open clusters (e.g. Friel 1995;…”
• Double neutron stars: merger rates revisited (2017, methodology): “The observational studies of the age-metallicity relation for the Milky Way reveal that this relation is nearly flat until ∼8 Gyr ago (e.g. Bergemann et al. 2014).”
• PLATO as it is: a legacy mission for Galactic archaeology (2017, unknown): “…et al. 2013, 2014; Snaith et al. 2015), where current data suggest that the thick disk formation started at z ∼ 3.5 (12 Gyear ago) while the thin disk began to form at z ∼ 1.5 (8 Gyear ago) (e.g., Bensby et al. 2014; Bergemann et al. 2014; Fuhrmann 2011; Haywood et al. 2013; Robin et al. 2014).”
• THE EFFECT OF RADIAL MIGRATION ON GALACTIC DISKS (2014, background): “…difficulty with this simple scenario arises in our Galaxy from the weak correlation between age and metallicity for thin disk stars in the solar neighborhood (Edvardsson et al. 1993), which is essentially flat for ages between 0 and 8 Gyr (see, e.g., Bergemann et al. 2014, and references therein).”
• Constraining the thick disc formation scenario of the Milky Way (2014, unknown): “However, it has been seen since their study that there is a clear discontinuity in α element abundances between the thin disc and thick disc (Adibekyan et al. 2013; Haywood et al. 2013; Bergemann et al. 2014; Recio-Blanco et al. 2014).”
• The age–metallicity structure of the Milky Way disc using APOGEE (2017, background): “Martig et al. (2016b) comment on the bias in the context that the ages returned for high [α/Fe] stars appear younger than previous estimates (from Haywood et al. 2013; Bensby et al. 2014; Bergemann et al. 2014).”
• THE STELLAR POPULATION STRUCTURE OF THE GALACTIC DISK (2015, background): “Because high-[α/Fe] populations are likely to be the oldest populations in the disk (see discussion in Bovy et al. 2012c and Haywood et al. 2013; Bergemann et al. 2014; Martig et al. 2015), this implies that similar physical conditions existed throughout the disk at early times, a conclusion also…”
• THE APOKASC CATALOG: AN ASTEROSEISMIC AND SPECTROSCOPIC JOINT SURVEY OF TARGETS IN THE KEPLER FIELDS (2014, methodology): “These surveys permit detailed stellar population reconstructions using chemical tagging, kinematic data, effective temperature, and surface gravities; see for example, Bovy et al. (2012) for SEGUE, Bergemann et al. (2014) for Gaia-ESO, or Binney et al. (2014) for RAVE.”
• Red giant masses and ages derived from carbon and nitrogen abundances (2015, unknown): “Stars with [ α /M] > 0.15 here have a median age of 7.9 Gyr, while previous studies suggest ages of the order of 9–10 Gyr for the α - rich sequence (Haywood et al. 2013; Bensby et al. 2014; Bergemann et al. 2014).”
• CHEMICAL CARTOGRAPHY WITH APOGEE: METALLICITY DISTRIBUTION FUNCTIONS AND THE CHEMICAL STRUCTURE OF THE MILKY WAY DISK (2015, result): “This relation is in qualitative agreement with observations of the age–metallicity relationship of the solar neighborhood (e.g., Nordström et al. 2004; Haywood et al. 2013; Bergemann et al. 2014).”
• Impacts of a flaring star-forming disc and stellar radial mixing on the vertical metallicity gradient (2016, background): “In general, the high-α disc stars are older than low-α disc stars (see also Bergemann et al. 2014; Masseron & Gilmore 2015), although some ”anomalies” of young high-α disc stars are also found (Chiappini et al. 2015; Martig et al. 2015).”
• Stellar ages and masses in the solar neighbourhood: Bayesian analysis using spectroscopy and Gaia DR1 parallaxes (2018, background): “…with some reporting a rather flat trend for disk stars but with substantial scatter in metallicity across all ages (e.g., C11) while others report a downward trend between age and metallicity, especially at higher ages (e.g., Edvardsson et al. 1993; Rocha-Pinto et al. 2000; Bergemann et al. 2014).”
• The Gaia-ESO Survey: the analysis of high-resolution UVES spectra of FGK-type stars (2014, methodology): “A detailed description of the SGU pipeline will be published elsewhere (Bergemann et al. 2014c, in prep).”
• On the metallicity of open clusters. III. Homogenised sample (2015, background): “Recently, Bergemann et al. (2014) used high-resolution spectroscopic data of a sample of field stars and found a clear decline in metallicity for stars older than 8 Gyr.”
• Spectroscopy Made Easy: Evolution (2016, methodology): “SME has been used with departure coefficients for Li, C, O, Na, Mg, Al, Si, Ca, Fe, Ba, and Eu (e.g., Bergemann et al. 2014; Osorio et al. 2015; Gruyters et al. 2016; Nordlander et al. 2016).”
• TRACING CHEMICAL EVOLUTION OVER THE EXTENT OF THE MILKY WAY'S DISK WITH APOGEE RED CLUMP STARS (2014, result): “This feature has also been seen in other recent high-resolution studies (e.g., Adibekyan et al. 2013; Ramı́rez et al. 2013; Bensby et al. 2014; RecioBlanco et al. 2014; Bergemann et al. 2014).”