MINCE I. Presentation of the project and of the first year sample
Journal
Date Issued
2022
Author(s)
•
P. Bonifacio
•
E. Caffau
•
L. Monaco
•
•
L. Lombardo
•
A. M. Matas Pinto
•
F. Lucertini
•
P. François
•
E. Spitoni
•
R. Lallement
•
L. Sbordone
•
A. Mucciarelli
•
M. Spite
•
C. J. Hansen
•
•
A. Kučinskas
•
V. Dobrovolskas
•
A. J. Korn
•
M. Valentini
•
•
•
F. Matteucci
Abstract
In recent years, Galactic archaeology has become a particularly vibrant field
of astronomy, with its main focus set on the oldest stars of our Galaxy. In
most cases, these stars have been identified as the most metal-poor. However,
the struggle to find these ancient fossils has produced an important bias in
the observations - in particular, the intermediate metal-poor stars
(-2.5<[Fe/H]< -1.5) have been frequently overlooked. The missing information
has consequences for the precise study of the chemical enrichment of our
Galaxy, in particular for what concerns neutron-capture elements and it will be
only partially covered by future multi-object spectroscopic surveys such as
WEAVE and 4MOST. Measuring at Intermediate Metallicity Neutron Capture Elements
(MINCE) is gathering the first high-quality spectra (high S/N ratio and high
resolution) for several hundreds of bright and metal-poor stars, mainly located
in our Galactic halo. We compiled our selection mainly on the basis of Gaia
data and determined the stellar atmospheres of our sample and the chemical
abundances of each star. In this paper, we present the first sample of 59
spectra of 46 stars. We measured the radial velocities and computed the
Galactic orbits for all stars. We found that 8 stars belong to the thin disc,
15 to disrupted satellites, and the remaining cannot be associated to the
mentioned structures, and we call them halo stars. For 33 of these stars, we
provide abundances for the elements up to zinc. We also show the chemical
evolution results for eleven chemical elements, based on recent models. Our
observational strategy of using multiple telescopes and spectrographs to
acquire high S/N and high-resolution spectra has proven to be very efficient
since the present sample was acquired over only about one year of observations.
Finally, our target selection strategy proved satisfactory for our purposes.
Volume
668
Start page
A168
Issn Identifier
0004-6361
Rights
open.access
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