Accurate abundance patterns of solar twins and analogs - Does the anomalous solar chemical composition come from planet formation?

By I. Ramirez, Jorge Meléndez, Martin Asplund. 2009

227 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We derive the abundance of 19 elements in a sample of 64 stars with fundamental parameters very similar to solar, which minimizes the impact of systematic errors in our spectroscopic 1D-LTE differential analysis, using high-resolution (R � 60 000), high signalto-noise ratio (S /N � 200) spectra. The estimated errors in the elemental abundances relative to solar are as small as � 0.025 dex. The abundance ratios [X/ Fe] as af unction of [Fe/H] agree closely with previously established patterns of Galactic thin-disk chemical evolution. Interestingly, the majority of our stars show a significant correlation between [X/Fe] and condensation temperature (TC). In the sample of 22 stars with parameters closest to solar, we find that, on average, low TC elements are depleted with respect to high TC elements in the solar twins relative to the Sun by about 0.08 dex (� 20%). An increasing trend is observed for the abundances as a function of TC for 900 < TC < 1800 K, while abundances of lower TC elements appear to be roughly constant. We speculate that this is a signature of the planet formation that occurred around the Sun but not in the majority of solar twins. If this hypothesis is correct, stars with planetary systems like ours, although rare (frequency of � 15%), may be identified through a very detailed inspection of the chemical compositions of their host stars.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fb4553b5527246999d53699d75d37e0dc05991f9

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Citations in the corpus

Effect of episodic accretion on the structure and the lithium depletion of low-mass stars and planet-hosting stars (2010, background): “…suggestion provides a consistent explanation for the recently claimed peculiar chemical abundance of the Sun, with about 20% depletion of refractory elements relative to volatile elements, compared with solartype analogs harboring close-in giant planets (Melendez et al. 2009; Ramirez et al. 2009).”
XHIP: An extended hipparcos compilation (2011, unknown): “(2011), Santos et al. (2011), Masseron et al. (2010), Gebran et al. (2010), Schuster (2010), Ramirez et al. (2009), Guillout et al. (2009), Nissen & Jenkins et al. (2008), Soubiran et al. (2008), Robinson et al. (2007), GCS3, Taylor (2005), Soubiran et al. (2003), Beers et al. (2000), and Chiba &…”
Exploring the Milky Way stellar disk - A detailed elemental abundance study of 714 F and G dwarf stars in the solar neighbourhood (2013, methodology): “…of solar analogs have shown that a purely spectroscopic approach (i.e.Teff from excitation balance of abundances from Fei lines and logg from ionisation balance of abundances from Fei and Feii lines) has better precision than when using logg based on parallaxes (e.g., Ramírez et al. 2009).”