Chemical evolution with radial mixing

By R. Schoenrich, J. Binney. 2008

525 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Models of the chemical evolution of our Galaxy are extended to include radial migration of stars and flow of gas through the disc. The models track the production of both iron and α-elements. A model is chosen that provides an excellent fit to the metallicity distribution of stars in the Geneva-Copenhagen survey (GCS) of the solar neighbourhood and a good fit to the local Hess diagram. The model provides a good fit to the distribution of GCS stars in the age-metallicity plane, although this plane was not used in the fitting process. Although this model's star formation rate is monotonically declining, its disc naturally splits into an α-enhanced thick disc and a normal thin disc. In particular, the model's distribution of stars in the ([O/Fe], [Fe/H]) plane resembles that of Galactic stars in displaying a ridge line for each disc. The thin-disc's ridge line is entirely due to stellar migration, and there is the characteristic variation of stellar angular momentum along it that has been noted by Haywood in survey data. Radial mixing of stellar populations with high σ z from inner regions of the disc to the solar neighbourhood provides a natural explanation of why measurements yield a steeper increase of σ z with age than predicted by theory. The metallicity gradient in the interstellar medium is predicted to be steeper than in earlier models, but appears to be in good agreement with data for both our Galaxy and external galaxies. The models are inconsistent with a cut-off in the star formation rate at low gas surface densities. The absolute magnitude of the disc is given as a function of time in several photometric bands, and radial colour profiles are plotted for representative times.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

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Citations in the corpus

Yule-Simpson’s paradox in Galactic Archaeology (2019, background): “Schönrich & Binney (2009a) argued that the presence of a negative correlation in the MVR for stars in the chem- ically defined thin disc (or more correctly, the low-[α/Fe] sequence) is an indication of migration.”
The age–metallicity structure of the Milky Way disc using APOGEE (2017, methodology): “More recently, the effects of radial migration (e.g. Sellwood & Binney 2002) were added, in order to produce models that agree better with the observations (e.g. Loebman et al. 2011; Schönrich & Binney 2009a; Spitoni et al. 2015; Kubryk et al. 2015) .”
A FIRST CONSTRAINT ON THE THICK DISK SCALE LENGTH: DIFFERENTIAL RADIAL ABUNDANCES IN K GIANTS AT GALACTOCENTRIC RADII 4, 8, AND 12 kpc (2011, background): “And certainly, radial migration has surfaced as an important mechanism in the modelling of disk galaxies (e.g., Roškar et al. 2008a,b; Schönrich & Binney 2009a,b; Loebman et al. 2010).”
The Gaia-ESO Survey : radial metallicity gradients and age-metallicity relation of stars in the Milky Way disk (2014, methodology): “For example, the semi-analytical model by (Schönrich & Binney 2009b, see their Fig.”
The Galaxy in Context: Structural, Kinematic, and Integrated Properties (2016, background): “…the Galactic thick disk arises from a combination of stellar migration and/or flaring of the old disk stars, such that its history is tied to the formation of the thin disk even though its mean metallicity may be different (e.g., Schönrich & Binney 2009, Loebman et al. 2011, Minchev et al. 2015).”
The effects of radial migration on the vertical structure of Galactic discs (2012, methodology): “Their conclusion disagrees sharply with the findings of Schönrich & Binney (2009b), who assumedenergy conservation rather than action conservation when modeling the vertical distribution in their analytic models.”
EVOLVING GRAVITATIONALLY UNSTABLE DISKS OVER COSMIC TIME: IMPLICATIONS FOR THICK DISK FORMATION (2011, methodology): “For Milky Way-like galaxies, even modern chemodynamical models with sophisticated treatments of stellar migration and evolution rely on highly parameterized treatments of gas inflow in the disk (Schönrich & Binney 2009; Spitoni & Matteucci 2011).”
The Lives of Stars: Insights from the TGAS–RAVE–LAMOST Data Set (2018, methodology): “This is fiducially similar to observations by Feuillet et al. (2016) and Bernard et al. (2018), as well as to model parameters in Schönrich & Binney (2009).”
LAMOST Experiment for Galactic Understanding and Exploration (LEGUE) — The survey's science plan (2012, background): “Schönrich & Binney (2009) have set up a chemical evolution model taking into account radial migration.”
The GALAH survey and Gaia DR2: dissecting the stellar disc’s phase space by age, action, chemistry, and location (2018, background): “…ow nloaded from https://academ ic.oup.com /m nras/article-abstract/486/1/1167/5298890 by Australian N ational U niversity user on 10 O ctober 2019 Schönrich & Binney 2009) that favours stars with low vertical dispersion σ z on near circular orbits (Minchev & Famaey 2010; Daniel & Wyse 2018).”
TRACING CHEMICAL EVOLUTION OVER THE EXTENT OF THE MILKY WAY'S DISK WITH APOGEE RED CLUMP STARS (2014, methodology): “This picture roughly resembles the scenario put forward by Schönrich & Binney (2009a), in which stars form with different enrichment histories as a function of galactocentric radius, and the key mechanism for producing a superposition of populations is radial migration of stars away from their…”
Origin and structure of the Galactic disc(s) (2009, methodology): “We have modified the Schönrich & Binney (2009) model very slightly by increasing the 〈v2R〉 1/2 of a 10 Gyr-old population of local stars from 38 kms−1 (cf Dehnen & Binney 1998) to 45 km s−1.”
THE VERTICAL METALLICITY GRADIENT OF THE MILKY WAY DISK: TRANSITIONS IN [α/Fe] POPULATIONS (2014, methodology): “Finally, work by Roškar et al. (2008), Schönrich & Binney (2009a), and Loebman et al. (2011) propose that the thick disk forms via radial migration, whether by processes internal to the galaxy or enhanced by mergers or close encounters (Quillen et al. 2009; Bird et al. 2012).”
Kinematics and history of the solar neighbourhood revisited (2009, background): “The reason for this is that the thick disc is not only metal-poor and old, but has a more complex structure (Schönrich & Binney 2009b).”
THE SPATIAL STRUCTURE OF MONO-ABUNDANCE SUB-POPULATIONS OF THE MILKY WAY DISK (2011, background): “Assuming that the [α/Fe] ratio is an adequate proxy for age (e.g., Schönrich & Binney 2009b), our results then imply that the α-enhanced, hence oldest, populations are more centrally concentrated—have a shorter scale length—than populations with α-abundances that are closer to Solar, and therefore…”
THE STELLAR POPULATION STRUCTURE OF THE GALACTIC DISK (2015, background): “…whether from satellites (e.g., Quinn et al. 1993; Abadi et al. 2003; Brook et al. 2004) or through radial migration (e.g., Sellwood & Binney 2002; Schönrich & Binney 2009; Minchev & Famaey 2010; Loebman et al. 2011), the possibility that (at least some part of) the stellar disk formed…”
THE METALLICITY DISTRIBUTION FUNCTIONS OF SEGUE G AND K DWARFS: CONSTRAINTS FOR DISK CHEMICAL EVOLUTION AND FORMATION (2011, methodology): “We also calculate mass weights based on the Schönrich & Binney (2009a, 2009b) Galaxy models (SB), which utilize a Salpeter IMF (Salpeter 1955), to examine how much these values will vary with different assumptions about the mass function (Section 6.4.1).”
Constraining the Milky Way assembly history with Galactic Archaeology (2016, methodology): “…models tuned to fit the local metallicity distribution, velocity dispersion, and chemical gradients, etc., today (e.g., Kubryk et al. 2015; Schönrich & Binney 2009a) or Extended distribution functions (Sanders & Binney, 2015): − Easy to vary parameters − Provide good description of the…”