Carbon Abundance Of Globular Cluster M22 (NGC 6656) And The Surface Carbon Depletion Rates Of The Milky Way Globular Clusters

It is well known that metal-poor red giant branch (RGB) stars show variations in some elemental abundances, including carbon, due to the internal mixing accompanied by their own in situ CN cycle in the hydrogen burning shell.

With our new photometric carbon abundance measurements of RGB stars in M22 and other globular clusters (GCs) in our previous studies, M5, M3, and M92, we derive the carbon depletion rates against the V magnitude, d[C/Fe]/MV, for individual populations in each GC. We find the metallicity dependence of the carbon depletion rates, d[C/Fe]/MV ∝ −0.25[Fe/H].

Our results also suggest that the carbon depletion rates of the second generation (SG) of stars are larger than those of the first generation (FG) of stars in our sample GCs, most likely due to different internal temperature profiles with different initial helium abundances between the FG and SG.

Our results can provide critical constraints both on understanding the mixing efficiency in the theoretical models, which is largely unknown, and on interpretation of the observational carbon abundance evolution of the bright halo RGB stars.

Jae-Woo Lee

Comments: Accepted for publication to the Astrophysical Journal Letters. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2305.02983
Subjects: Astrophysics of Galaxies (astro-ph.GA); Solar and Stellar Astrophysics (astro-ph.SR)
Cite as: arXiv:2306.04391 [astro-ph.GA] (or arXiv:2306.04391v1 [astro-ph.GA] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2306.04391
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Submission history
From: Jae-Woo Lee
[v1] Wed, 7 Jun 2023 12:43:34 UTC (1,940 KB)
https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.04391
Astrobiology, Astrochemistry