Astronomy & Telescopes

Elemental Abundances of Solar Sibling Candidates

By Keith Cowing
astro-ph.SR
May 9, 2014
Filed under ,
Elemental Abundances of Solar Sibling Candidates
Location of Solar SIbling HD162826

Dynamical information along with survey data on metallicity and in some cases age have been used recently by some authors to search for candidates of stars that were born in the cluster where the Sun formed.

We have acquired high resolution, high signal-to-noise ratio spectra for 30 of these objects to determine, using detailed elemental abundance analysis, if they could be true solar siblings. Only two of the candidates are found to have solar chemical composition. Updated modeling of the stars’ past orbits in a realistic Galactic potential reveals that one of them, HD162826, satisfies both chemical and dynamical conditions for being a sibling of the Sun.

Measurements of rare-element abundances for this star further confirm its solar composition, with the only possible exception of Sm. Analysis of long-term high-precision radial velocity data rules out the presence of hot Jupiters and confirms that this star is not in a binary system.

We find that chemical tagging does not necessarily benefit from studying as many elements as possible, but instead from identifying and carefully measuring the abundances of those elements which show large star-to-star scatter at a given metallicity. Future searches employing data products from ongoing massive astrometric and spectroscopic surveys can be optimized by acknowledging this fact.

I. Ramirez, A. T. Bajkova, V. V. Bobylev, I. U. Roederer, D. L. Lambert, M. Endl, W. D. Cochran, P. J. MacQueen, R. A. Wittenmyer (Submitted on 7 May 2014)

Comments: ApJ, in press. Tables 2 and 4 are available in full in the “Other formats: source” download

Subjects: Solar and Stellar Astrophysics (astro-ph.SR)

Cite as: arXiv:1405.1723 [astro-ph.SR] (or arXiv:1405.1723v1 [astro-ph.SR] for this version)

Submission history From: Ivan Ramirez [v1] Wed, 7 May 2014 20:00:03 GMT (200kb)

Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA Space Station Payload manager/space biologist, Away Teams, Journalist, Lapsed climber, Synaesthete, Na’Vi-Jedi-Freman-Buddhist-mix, ASL, Devon Island and Everest Base Camp veteran, (he/him) 🖖🏻