Bibcode
Ramírez, I.; Allende Prieto, C.; Lambert, D. L.
Referencia bibliográfica
Astronomy and Astrophysics, Volume 465, Issue 1, April I 2007, pp.271-289
Fecha de publicación:
4
2007
Revista
Número de citas
191
Número de citas referidas
166
Descripción
The abundances of iron and oxygen are homogeneously determined in a
sample of 523 nearby (d<150 pc) FGK disk and halo stars with
metallicities in the range -1.5<[Fe/H]<0.5. Iron abundances were
obtained from an LTE analysis of a large set of Fe I and Fe II lines
with reliable atomic data. Oxygen abundances were inferred from a
restricted non-LTE analysis of the 777 nm O I triplet. We adopted the
infrared flux method temperature scale and surface gravities based on
Hipparcos trigonometric parallaxes. Within this framework, the
ionization balance of iron lines is not satisfied: the mean abundances
from the Fe I lines are systematically lower by 0.06 dex than those from
the Fe II lines for dwarf stars of Teff>5500 K and
[Fe/H]<0.0, and giant stars of all temperatures and metallicities
covered by our sample. The discrepancy worsens for cooler and metal-rich
main-sequence stars. We use the stellar kinematics to compute the
probabilities of our sample stars to be members of the thin disk, thick
disk, or halo of the Galaxy. We find that the majority of the
kinematically-selected thick-disk stars show larger [O/Fe] ratios
compared to thin-disk stars while the rest show thin-disk abundances,
which suggests that the latter are thin-disk members with unusual
(hotter) kinematics. A close examination of this pattern for disk stars
with ambiguous probabilities shows that an intermediate population with
properties between those of the thin and thick disks does not exist, at
least in the solar neighborhood. Excluding the stars with unusual
kinematics, we find that thick-disk stars show slowly decreasing [O/Fe]
ratios from about 0.5 to 0.4 in the -0.8<[Fe/H]<-0.3 range. Using
a simple model for the chemical evolution of the thick disk we show that
this trend results directly from the metallicity dependence of the Type
II supernova yields. At [Fe/H]>-0.3, we find no obvious indication of
a sudden decrease (i.e., a "knee") in the [O/Fe] vs. [Fe/H] pattern of
thick-disk stars that would connect the thick and thin disk trends at a
high metallicity. We conclude that Type Ia supernovae (SN Ia) did not
contribute significantly to the chemical enrichment of the thick disk.
In the -0.8<[Fe/H]<+0.3 range, thin-disk stars show decreasing
[O/Fe] ratios from about 0.4 to 0.0 that require a SN Ia contribution.
The implications of these results for studies of the formation and
evolution of the Galactic disk are discussed.
Tables 4-6 are only available in electronic form at the CDS via
anonymous ftp to cdsarc.u-strasbg.fr (130.79.128.5) or via
http://cdsweb.u-strasbg.fr/cgi-bin/qcat?J/A+A/465/271 Partially based on
observations obtained with the Hobby-Eberly Telescope, which is a joint
project of the University of Texas at Austin, the Pennsylvania State
University, Stanford University, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität
München, and Georg-August-Universität Göttingen; and data
from the UVES Paranal Observatory Project (ESO DDT Program ID
266.D-5655).