Strong Chemical Tagging in FIRE: Intra- and Intercluster Chemical Homogeneity in Open Clusters in Milky Way–like Galaxy Simulations
Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: Open-star clusters are the essential building blocks of the Galactic disk; “strong chemical tagging”—the premise that all star clusters can be reconstructed given chemistry information alone—is a driving force behind many current and upcoming large Galactic spectroscopic surveys. In this work, we characterize the abundance patterns for nine elements (C, N, O, Ne, Mg, Si, S, Ca, and Fe) in open clusters (OCs) in three galaxies (m12i, m12f, and m12m) from the Latte suite of FIRE-2 simulations, to investigate the feasibility of strong chemical tagging in these simulations. We select young massive (≥104.6 M ⊙) OCs formed in the last ∼100 Myr and calculate the intra- and intercluster abundance scatter for these clusters. We compare these results with analogous calculations drawn from observations of OCs in the Milky Way. We find the intracluster scatter of the observations and simulations to be comparable. While the abundance scatter within each cluster is minimal (≲0.020 dex), the mean abundance patterns of different clusters are not unique. We also calculate the chemical difference in intra- and intercluster star pairs and find it, in general, to be so small that it is difficult to distinguish between stars drawn from the same OC or from different OCs. Despite tracing three distinct nucleosynthetic families (core-collapse supernovae, white dwarf supernovae, and stellar winds), we conclude that these elemental abundances do not provide enough discriminating information to use strong chemical tagging for reliable OC membership.
Source: The Astrophysical Journal
Language: English
Subfield: Astronomy and Astrophysics
Field: Physics and Astronomy
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $4,499
Awards: G1050676322, G1473170693, G2782160116, G3226045097, G3695770934, XSEDE 2.0: Integrating, Enabling and Enhancing National Cyberinfrastructure with Expanding Community Involvement, G4062403223, Collaborative Research: Magellanic dwarfs as a key laboratory for dwarf galaxy formation, G4193003688, G433322167, CAREER: Galactic Archeology: Understanding the Building Blocks of the Milky Way across Cosmic Time, G5355319658, G58316358, G5954056825, G6273510985, G6671297155, G6723240001, G7698687035, G8762057088, Simulating the life cycle of star clusters: from birth to death in a cosmological galactic context
OpenAlex ID: W4404977466