Orbital Parameters of 80 Nearby Mildly Metal-Poor Stars: a search for correlations between abundance ratios and kinematics. |
Abstract |
Orbital characteristics of 80 HIPPARCOS mildly metal-poor stars are derived assuming a sligthly modified Ostriker and Caldwell (1979) Galactic model. A comparison with other studies is performed and relations between the dynamical properties of the stars and their well-known spectroscopic abundances are investigated. We pay a special attention to the 21 stars of Jehin et al. (1999).
Table of contents |
1. Introduction |
The chemical composition of unevolved metal-poor stars provides important information about the nucleosynthesis processes during the early galactic evolution. As these low mass stars do not dissipate orbital energy the knowledge of their kinematics provides new "fossil" information with which to explore various formation scenarios (Johnston et al. 1996).
2. The Galactic Mass Model |
We have adopted a slightly modified Ostriker and Caldwell (1979) model, whose components are:
2.1. Thr Density Laws |
(1) |
(2) |
(3) |
2.2. Rotation Curve |
We used the Ostriker and Caldwell's values for the parameters in the density laws (1)-(3), and we adjusted the contribution of each component in order to obtain the best possible agreement with the observed rotation curve as is usually done. We used the Allen and Santillàn (1991) observational data for the rotation curve. The contributions to the rotation curve of each component are shown in Fig. 1.
2.3. The Potential |
The potential of each component is calculated numerically from the Poisson's equation = 4 G. The resulting isopotential contours in the meridional plane are shown in Fig. 2.
3. The Data |
The data sample was built from 3 different studies giving high quality
abundance ratios of nearby unevolved metal-poors stars. These stars have a
metallicity around [Fe/H] ~ -1, which corresponds approximately
to the transition between the halo and the disk.
The 21 stars taken from Jehin et al. (1999) have high precision abundance
ratios of 16 elements. Nissen and Schuster (1997) derived accurate
abundances for 11 elements and have computed orbits with the model of Allen
and Santillàn (1991) for 25 disk and halo stars. The 40 most
metal-poor ([Fe/H] < -0.6) F and G disk stars come from the large
study of Edvadsson et al. (1993), where they have obtained accurate
abundances of a douzen elements in a differential analysis with respect to
the sun, and the orbital parameters using a three-component Myamoto
potential.
The new parallaxes and proper motions are available in the HIPPARCOS
Catalogue (ESA, 1997). The
is better than 15 % for all these stars (except for 5 stars from
Nissen and Schuster, 1997) with a mean error of 5.5 % for all the
sample. Proper motions errors only reach 2 %. The radial velocities
were selected from several sources: Barbier-Brossat et al. (1994), Evans
(1967) and Wilson (1953). They are known to about 2 km/s for most of the
stars.
We applied a systematic correction to the abundance ratios, based on stars
which are common with the analysis of Nissen and Schuster (1997).
4. Galactic space velocities |
We calculate the Galactic space velocities U (radially outwards), V (in the
direction of the Galactic rotation), W (vertically upwards) and their
errors with respect to the local standard of rest using the method
presented in Johnson and Soderblom (1987). The corrections applied to the
observed velocities taking into account the solar motion are (-10.4, +14.8,
+7.3) km/s in (U,V,W) (Mihalas and Routly, 1968). The solar galactocentric
distance and circular velocity were taken to be 8.0 kpc and 220 km/s,
respectively.
For each star our calculations were carried out during 1000 crossings of
the Galactic plane. We used time steps of 104 years and at the
end of most orbital trajectory the total energy was conserved to
. We maintained the z-component of the
angular momentum at its initial value throughout the computation. We
determined the area covered by the orbit in the meridional plane (R,z) as
well as horizontal and vertical Poincarés surface of section. Both
regular (box, tube, etc.) and chaotic orbits were found as it is
illustrated in Fig. 3,
4, 5 et
6
During the integration of the orbit only a fraction of the positions of the
star are recorded, so it defines a background area in the meridional plane.
In order to get an idea about the actual trajectory we overplotted the
beginning of the orbit's path whose duration is approximately 500 million
years, as shown in Figs. 3 and
5 for two stars.
In the horizontal surface of section, a (R, dR/dt) point has been
plotted each time the star crossed the Galactic plane upwards. The results
for two stars are shown in Figs. 4 and
6.
Orbital characteristics such as Rmin (the minimum
projected distance to the Galactic center), Rmax (the
maximum projected distance to the Galactic center), eccentricity taken as (Rmax-Rmin)/(Rmax+Rmin),
and Zmax (the maximum heigth reached by the star over the
Galactic plane) were computed, as well as the errors on these parameters.
Monte Carlo simulations show that the mean relative errors for the stars
with box-orbit type are around 1 % for Rmin and
Rmax, 7 % for the eccentricity and 7.7 % for
Zmax. The results for the 21 stars from Jehin et al.
(1999) are listed in table 1.
5. Correlation with abundances |
I our attempt to find some correlation between kinematics and abundance ratios, we confirm in Fig. 7, with our new data and computations, the relation found by Nissen and Schuster (1997) between the abundance ratio [Ni/Fe] and Zmax (or Rmax), the maximum height above the Galactic plane reached by the star in its orbit. We find similar correlations for [Na/Fe] and the [-elements/Fe] ratios. The results could be explained by assuming that these stars have been accreted from low density regions of the outer halo, where the chemical evolution proceeds more slowly than in the inner halo (Nissen and Schuster 1997). However, the stars with peculiar [Na, Ni, /Fe] ratios are also characterized by very small perigalactica (Rmin <&nbdp;1.5 kpc), as shown in Fig. 8, and high eccentricity (e > 0.85), orbital properties that seem to exclude (Gilmore and Wyse 1998) the accretion of such lightly bound systems. Another explanation is provided by the EASE scenario (Jehin et al. 1999, Jehin et al., this meeting), where it is suggested that these stars were born in (proto-) globular clusters.
7. Figures |
Figure 1 |
Figure 2 |
Figure 3 |
Figure 4 |
Figure 5 |
Figure 6 |
Figure 7 |
Figure 8 |
Acknowledgements |
We are grateful to Dominique Naef to have made available, before publication, the CORAVEL radial velocities of our stars. This work has been supported by contracts ARC 94/99-178 "Action de Recherche Concertée de la Communauté Française de Belgique" and by the Pôle d'Attraction Interuniversitaire P4/05 (SSTC, Belgium).
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