Clusters

The GALAH survey: Chemical homogeneity of the Orion complex

Due to its proximity the Orion star forming region is often used as a proxy to study processes related to star formation and observe young stars in the environment they were born in. Orion is getting additional attention within the Gaia DR2, as distance measurements are now good enough that a three dimensional structure of the complex can be explored.

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The GALAH Survey: Chemically tagging the Fimbulthul stream to the globular cluster ω Centauri

Using kinematics from Gaia and the large elemental abundance space of the second data release of the GALAH survey, we identify two new members of the Fimbulthul stellar stream, and chemically tag them to massive, multi-metallic globular cluster ω Centauri. Recent analysis of the second data release of Gaia had revealed the Fimbulthul stellar stream in the halo of the Milky Way. It had been proposed that the stream is associated with the ω Centauri, but this proposition relied exclusively upon the kinematics and metallicities of the stars to make the association. In this work, we find our two new members of the stream to be metal-poor stars that are enhanced in sodium and aluminium, typical of second population globular cluster stars, but not otherwise seen in field stars. Furthermore, the stars share the s-process abundance pattern seen in ω Centauri, which is rare in field stars. Apart from one star within 1.5 deg of ω Centauri, we find no other stars observed by GALAH spatially near ω Centauri or the Fimbulthul stream that could be kinematically and chemically linked to the cluster. Chemically tagging stars in the Fimbulthul stream to ω Centauri confirms the earlier work, and further links this tidal feature in the Milky Way halo to ω Centauri.

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The GALAH Survey and Gaia DR2: (Non)existence of four sparse high-latitude open clusters

Sparse open clusters can be found at high galactic latitudes where loosely populated clusters are more easily detected against the lower stellar background. As bursty star formation takes place in the thin disk, the population of clusters far from the Galactic plane is hard to explain. We combined spectral parameters from the GALAH survey with the Gaia DR2 catalogue to study dynamics and chemistry of 5 old sparse high-latitude clusters in more detail.

Non-LTE abundance patterns in M67

One of the main goals of the Galah survey is to find stellar siblings in the Galactic disk and associate them to a common parent cluster by means of chemistry and dynamics. The success of such chemical tagging hinges critically on our ability to determine the abundances of late-type dwarf and giant stars with high precision, but also to assess whether their present-day abundance patterns truly reflect their original compositions.

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The GALAH survey: co-orbiting stars and chemical tagging

We present a study using the second data release of the GALAH survey of stellar parameters and elemental abundances of 15 pairs of stars identified by Oh et al. They identified these pairs as potentially co-moving pairs using proper motions and parallaxes from Gaia DR1. We find that 11 very wide (>1 pc) pairs of stars do in fact have similar Galactic orbits, while a further four claimed co-moving pairs are not truly co-orbiting.

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t-SNE as a tool for studying clustering in the elemental abundance space

One of the main motivations for the GALAH survey is to measure abundances of many elements in sufficiently large number of stars that some of them can be identified as stars that were born in the same cluster but all indications of this fact have been lost, except for the chemical fingerprint. Chemical tagging can reveal the connection between such stars, but state of the art observations and analytical methods will be needed to actually perform this task.

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The GALAH survey: Characterization of emission-line stars with spectral modeling using autoencoders

We present a neural network autoencoder structure that is able to extract the most important latent spectral features from observed spectra and reconstruct a spectrum from those features. Because of the training process, the network is able to reproduce a spectrum of high signal to noise ratio that does not show any spectral peculiarities. Such generated spectra were used to identify various emission features among spectra acquired by multiple surveys using the HERMES spectrograph. Emission features were identified by a direct comparison of the observed and generated spectrum.

Reconstructing Fossil Sub-structures of the Galactic Disk: Clues from Abundance Patterns of Old Open Clusters and Moving Groups

The long term goal of large-scale chemical tagging is to use stellar elemental abundances as a tracer of dispersed substructures of the Galactic disk. The identification of such lost stellar aggregates and the exploration of their chemical properties will be key in understanding the formation and evolution of the disk. Present day stellar structures such as open clusters and moving groups are the ideal testing grounds for the viability of chemical tagging, as they are believed to be the remnants of the original larger star-forming aggregates.

Chemical Homogeneity in Collinder 261 and Implications for Chemical Tagging

This paper presents abundances for 12 red giants of the old open cluster Collinder 261 based on spectra from the Very Large Telescope UVES. Abundances were derived for Na, Mg, Si, Ca, Mn, Fe, Ni, Zr, and Ba. We find that the cluster has a solar-level metallicity of [Fe/H]=-0.03 dex. However, most α- and s-process elements were found to be enhanced. The star-to-star scatter was consistent with the expected measurement uncertainty for all elements. The observed rms scatter is as follows: Na=0.07, Mg=0.05, Si=0.06, Ca=0.05, Mn=0.03, Fe=0.02, Ni=0.04, Zr=0.12, and Ba=0.03 dex.

Chemical Homogeneity in the Hyades

We present an abundance analysis of the heavy elements Zr, Ba, La, Ce, and Nd for Hyades F-K dwarfs based on high-resolution, high signal-to-noise ratio spectra from Keck HIRES. The derived abundances show the stellar members to be highly uniform, although some elements show a small residual trend with temperature. The rms scatter for each element for the cluster members is as follows: Zr=0.055, Ba=0.049, Ce=0.025, La=0.025, and Nd=0.032 dex. This is consistent with the measurement errors and implies that there is little or no intrinsic scatter among the Hyades members.

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