Present-day cosmic abundances - A comprehensive study of nearby early B-type stars and implications for stellar and Galactic evolution and interstellar dust models

By M. Nieva, N. Przybilla. 2012

353 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Aims. A carefully selected sample of early B-type stars in OB associations and the field within the solar neighbourhood is studi ed comprehensively. Present-day abundances for the astrophysically most interesting chemical elements are derived in order to investigate whether a present-day cosmic abundance standard can be established. Methods. High-resolution and high-S/N spectra of well-studied sharp-lined early B-type stars ar e analysed in non-LTE. Atmospheric parameters are derived from the simultaneous establishment of independent indicators, from multiple ionization equi libria and the hydrogen Balmer lines, and they are confirmed by reproductio n of the stars’ global spectral energy distributions. Results. Effective temperatures are constrained to 1-2% and surface gravities to less than 15% uncertainty, along with accurate rotational, micro- and macroturbulence velocities. Good agreement of the resulting spectroscopic parallaxes with those from the new reduction of the Hipparcos catalogue is obtained. Absolute values for abundances of He, C, N, O, Ne, Mg, Si and Fe are determined to better than 25% uncertainty. The synthetic spectra match the observations reliably over almost the entire visual spe ctral range. Conclusions. A present-day cosmic abundance standard is established from a sample of 29 early B-type stars, indicating abundance fluctuations of less than 10% around the mean. Our results (i) resolve the long-standing discrepancy between a chemical homogeneous gas-phase ISM and a chemically inhomogeneous young stellar component out to several hundred parsec from the Sun, (ii) facilitate the amount of heavy elements locked up in the interstellar dust to be constrained precisely ‐ the results imply that carbo naceous dust is largely destroyed inside the Orion Hii region, unlike the silicates, and that graphite is only a min ority species in interstellar dust ‐, (iii) show that the mixing of CNO-burning products in the course of massive star evolution follows tightly the predicted nucl ear path, (iv) provide reliable present-day reference points for anchor ing Galactic chemical evolution models to observation, and (v) imply that the Sun has migrated outwards from the inner Galactic disk over its lifetime from a birthplace at a distance around 5-6 kpc from the Galactic Centre; a cancellation of the effects of Galactic chemical evolution and abundance gradients leads to the similarity of solar and present-day cosmic abundances in the solar neighbourhood, with a telltaling signature of the Sun’s origin left in th e C/O ratio. (ABRIDGED)

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a0a162e95458d8a66c9cbebd4f05937374c859d6

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Citations in the corpus

Measuring Radial Orbit Migration in the Galactic Disk (2018, background): “Nieva & Przybilla (2012) derived analogous constraints from chemical evolution arguments and data in the solar neighborhood, inferring a birth radius between 5 and 6 kpc.”
The vertical metallicity gradients of mono-age stellar populations in the Milky Way with the RAVE and Gaia data (2017, background): “In this paper, we assume that there was no metallicity dispersion for stars formed at a fixed radius as is seen for young B stars in the Solar neighbourhood (Nieva & Przybilla 2012; Feltzing & Chiba 2013), but there was a negative radial metallicity gradient.”
THE HAWAII INFRARED PARALLAX PROGRAM. II. YOUNG ULTRACOOL FIELD DWARFS (2016, background): “Metallicity is unlikely to be such a parameter, given the metallicity of local high-mass stars (Nieva & Przybilla 2012) and YMG stars (Biazzo et al. 2012; Barenfeld et al. 2013; McCarthy & Wilhelm 2014) appear to be basically solar (σ .”
Modelling the nebular emission from primeval to present-day star-forming galaxies (2016, methodology): “Specifically, we adopt a solar nitrogen abundance 0.15 dex smaller and an oxygen abundance 0.10 dex larger than the mean values quoted in table 5 of Caffau et al. (2011, see also Nieva & Przybilla 2012).”
BPASS predictions for binary black hole mergers (2016, background): “Villante et al. (2014), for example, suggest the metal fraction in the Sun is rather higher than usually assumed, while some authors (Allende Prieto, Lambert, & Asplund 2002; Asplund 2005) suggest that Solar metal abundances should be revised downwards to closer to Z = 0.014 (also appropriate for ma”
Binary Population and Spectral Synthesis Version 2.1: Construction, Observational Verification, and New Results (2017, methodology): “If an SN occurs within about 20 to 30 Mpcs of the Sun, and the host galaxy has been imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope before the transient event, there is a very good chance that the progenitor star could be detected in a pre-explosion image.”
Chemical abundances in high-redshift galaxies: a powerful new emission line diagnostic (2016, methodology): “This calibration is based on a mixture of both stellar and nebular sources (Izotov et al. 1999; Israelian et al. 2004; Spite et al. 2005; Nieva & Przybilla 2012).”
Estimating stellar birth radii and the time evolution of Milky Way’s ISM metallicity gradient (2018, background): “This appears to be the case at redshift zero from studies of local early B-type stars (Nieva & Przybilla 2012).”
The GALAH survey and Gaia DR2: dissecting the stellar disc’s phase space by age, action, chemistry, and location (2018, background): “In an important study, Nieva & Przybilla (2012) examine the elemental abundances of the local B star population and diffuse ISM.”
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…”
Stellar population effects on the inferred photon density at reionization (2015, background): “These metallicities correspond to oxygen abundances spanning log(O/H)+12=7.6 to 9.0, where Z = 0.020 (log(O/H)+12=8.8) is conventionally assumed to be the value for the present-day cosmic abundance of local Galactic massive stars as discussed by Nieva & Przybilla (2012).”
On the fine structure of the Cepheid metallicity gradient in the Galactic thin disk (2014, background): “…between the metallicity gradient based on Cepheids with the iron abundance of almost three Article number, page 5 of 34 dozen of early B–type stars (red triangles) located either in the solar neighborhood (Nieva & Przybilla 2012) or in the nearby Orion star forming region (Nieva & Simón-Díaz 2011).”
Impacts of a flaring star-forming disc and stellar radial mixing on the vertical metallicity gradient (2016, methodology): “For example, the recent measurement of the metallicity of a nearby sample of B stars show a very small dispersion (e.g. Nieva & Przybilla 2012; Feltzing & Chiba 2013).”
Measuring the vertical age structure of the Galactic disc using asteroseismology and SAGA (2015, background): “We remark that studies of local early-type stars and gas phase in diffuse interstellar medium reveal indeed a high degree of homogeneity in the present-day cosmic abundances (Sofia & Meyer 2001; Nieva & Przybilla 2012).”