文章基本信息

标题：The Most Metal-poor Stars in the Magellanic Clouds Are r-process Enhanced
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作者：Henrique Reggiani ; Kevin C.Schlaufman ; Andrew R.Casey 等
期刊名称：The Astronomical journal
印刷版ISSN：0004-6256
电子版ISSN：1538-3881
出版年度：2021
卷号：162
期号：6
页码：1-21
DOI：10.3847/1538-3881/ac1f9a
语种：English
出版社：American Institute of Physics
摘要：The chemical abundances of a galaxy's metal-poor stellar population can be used to investigate the earliest stages of its formation and chemical evolution. The Magellanic Clouds are the most massive of the Milky Way's satellite galaxies and are thought to have evolved in isolation until their recent accretion by the Milky Way. Unlike the Milky Way's less massive satellites, little is known about the Magellanic Clouds' metal-poor stars. We have used the mid-infrared metal-poor star selection of Schlaufman & Casey and archival data to target nine LMC and four SMC giants for high-resolution Magellan/MIKE spectroscopy. These nine LMC giants with −2.4 ≲ [Fe/H] ≲ −1.5 and four SMC giants with −2.6 ≲ [Fe/H] ≲ −2.0 are the most metal-poor stars in the Magellanic Clouds yet subject to a comprehensive abundance analysis. While we find that at constant metallicity these stars are similar to Milky Way stars in their α, light, and iron-peak elemental abundances, both the LMC and SMC are enhanced relative to the Milky Way in the r-process element europium. These abundance offsets are highly significant, equivalent to 3.9σ for the LMC, 2.7σ for the SMC, and 5.0σ for the complete Magellanic Cloud sample. We propose that the r-process enhancement of the Magellanic Clouds' metal-poor stellar population is a result of the Magellanic Clouds' isolated chemical evolution and long history of accretion from the cosmic web combined with r-process nucleosynthesis on a timescale longer than the core-collapse supernova timescale but shorter than or comparable to the thermonuclear (i.e., Type Ia) supernova timescale.