The AB Dor Moving Group: A Chemically Heterogeneous Kinematic Stream?

The AB Dor Moving Group is the nearest kinematic group to the Sun. It consists of a "nucleus" of 10 comoving stars at distance 20 pc (Zuckerman et al. 2004), along with dozens of purported "stream" members spread out across the sky, with distances up to 140 pc away (Torres et al. 2008). We perform a kinematic and chemical analysis of a sample of 10 AB Dor "stream" members to test whether they constitute a physical stellar group. We use the NEMO Galactic kinematic code to investigate the orbits of the stream members, and perform a chemical abundance analysis using high resolution, high S/N spectra taken with the MIKE spectrograph on the Magellan Clay 6.5-m telescope. Using a chi-squared test with the measured abundances for 10 different elements (Fe, Na, Mg, Si, Al, Ca, Cr, Mn, Ni, and Ba), we find that only a few of the ten purported AB Dor stream members appear to constitute a statistically chemically homogeneous sample. Our orbit simulations show that some of the "stream" members were hundreds of pc from AB Dor 100 Myr ago, and hence were unlikely to have formed near the eponymous star. The lack of kinematic and chemical coherence among the stream sample suggests that the published lists of AB Dor moving group members are unlikely to represent the dispersed remnant of a single star formation episode. Our study does not rule out the physicality of the AB Dor "nucleus" identified by Zuckerman et al., which appears to be coeval with the Pleiades ( 120 Myr). We conclude that the AB Dor stream is dynamical in nature, likely containing stars from many different birth sites. This research was supported by NSF grant AST-1008908, an REU supplement, and funds from the School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Rochester.