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Title: Stellar migration and chemical enrichment in the milky way disc: a hybrid model

Journal Article · · Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society

ABSTRACT We develop a hybrid model of galactic chemical evolution that combines a multiring computation of chemical enrichment with a prescription for stellar migration and the vertical distribution of stellar populations informed by a cosmological hydrodynamic disc galaxy simulation. Our fiducial model adopts empirically motivated forms of the star formation law and star formation history, with a gradient in outflow mass loading tuned to reproduce the observed metallicity gradient. With this approach, the model reproduces many of the striking qualitative features of the Milky Way disc’s abundance structure: (i) the dependence of the [O/Fe]–[Fe/H] distribution on radius Rgal and mid-plane distance |z|; (ii) the changing shapes of the [O/H] and [Fe/H] distributions with Rgal and |z|; (iii) a broad distribution of [O/Fe] at sub-solar metallicity and changes in the [O/Fe] distribution with Rgal, |z|, and [Fe/H]; (iv) a tight correlation between [O/Fe] and stellar age for [O/Fe] > 0.1; (v) a population of young and intermediate-age α-enhanced stars caused by migration-induced variability in the Type Ia supernova rate; (vi) non-monotonic age–[O/H] and age–[Fe/H] relations, with large scatter and a median age of ∼4 Gyr near solar metallicity. Observationally motivated models with an enhanced star formation rate ∼2 Gyr ago improve agreement with the observed age–[Fe/H] and age–[O/H] relations, but worsen agreement with the observed age–[O/Fe] relation. None of our models predict an [O/Fe] distribution with the distinct bimodality seen in the observations, suggesting that more dramatic evolutionary pathways are required. All code and tables used for our models are publicly available through the Versatile Integrator for Chemical Evolution (VICE; https://pypi.org/project/vice).

Research Organization:
US Department of Energy (USDOE), Washington, DC (United States). Office of Science, Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE
Contributing Organization:
Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS)
OSTI ID:
1890520
Alternate ID(s):
OSTI ID: 1982541
Journal Information:
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Journal Name: Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Vol. 508 Journal Issue: 3; ISSN 0035-8711
Publisher:
Oxford University PressCopyright Statement
Country of Publication:
United Kingdom
Language:
English

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