Principal Component Abundance Analysis of Microlensed Bulge Dwarf and Subgiant Stars
Abstract
Elemental abundance patterns can provide vital clues to the formation and enrichment history of a stellar population. Here we present an investigation of the Galactic bulge, where we apply principal component abundance analysis (PCAA) - a principal component decomposition of relative abundances [X/Fe] - to a sample of 35 microlensed bulge dwarf and subgiant stars, characterizing their distribution in the 12-dimensional space defined by their measured elemental abundances. The first principal component PC1, which suffices to describe the abundance patterns of most stars in the sample, shows a strong contribution from α-elements, reflecting the relative contributions of Type II and Type Ia supernovae. The second principal component PC2 is characterized by a Na-Ni correlation, the likely product of metallicity-dependent Type II supernova yields. The distribution in PC1 is bimodal, showing that the bimodality previously found in the [Fe/H] values of these stars is robustly and independently recovered by looking at only their relative abundance patterns. The two metal-rich stars that are α-enhanced have outlier values of PC2 and PC3, respectively, further evidence that they have distinctive enrichment histories. Applying PCAA to a sample of local thin and thick disk dwarfs yields a nearly identical PC1. In PC1, the metal-rich and metal-poor bulge dwarfs track kinematically selected thin and thick disk dwarfs, respectively, suggesting broadly similar α-enrichment histories. However, the disk PC2 is dominated by a Y-Ba correlation, likely indicating a contribution of s-process enrichment from long-lived asymptotic giant branch stars that is absent from the bulge PC2 because of its rapid formation.
- Publication:
-
Acta Astronomica
- Pub Date:
- September 2012
- DOI:
- 10.48550/arXiv.1205.4715
- arXiv:
- arXiv:1205.4715
- Bibcode:
- 2012AcA....62..269A
- Keywords:
-
- Galaxy: general;
- Galaxy: bulge;
- Galaxy: evolution;
- Galaxy: formation;
- Galaxy: stellar content;
- Stars: abundances;
- Astrophysics - Galaxy Astrophysics;
- Astrophysics - Solar and Stellar Astrophysics
- E-Print:
- 11 pages, 3 figures, accepted to Acta Astronomica. For a brief video explaining the key result of this paper, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Hv0gjZa-HA&