An extreme paucity of second population AGB stars in the `normal' globular cluster M4

Abstract

Galactic globular clusters (GCs) are now known to harbour multiple stellar populations, which are chemically distinct in many light element abundances. It is becoming increasingly clear that asymptotic giant branch (AGB) stars in GCs show different abundance distributions in light elements compared to those in the red giant branch (RGB) and other phases, skewing towards more primordial, field-star-like abundances, which we refer to as subpopulation one (SP1). As part of a larger programme targeting giants in GCs, we obtained high-resolution spectra for a sample of 106 RGB and 15 AGB stars in Messier 4 (NGC 6121) using the 2dF+HERMES facility on the Anglo-Australian Telescope. In this Letter, we report an extreme paucity of AGB stars with [Na/O] >-0.17 in M4, which contrasts with the RGB that has abundances up to [Na/O] =0.55. The AGB abundance distribution is consistent with all AGB stars being from SP1. This result appears to imply that all subpopulation two stars (SP2; Na-rich, O-poor) avoid the AGB phase. This is an unexpected result given M4's horizontal branch morphology - it does not have an extended blue horizontal branch. This is the first abundance study to be performed utilizing the HERMES spectrograph.