Galactic chemical abundance evolution in the solar neighborhood up to the iron peak

¹ Departament d'Astronomia i Meteorologia, Universitat de Barcelona, Martí i Franquès 1, 08028 Barcelona, Spain
² Institut d'Estudis Espacials de Catalunya, Edifici Nexus, Gran Capità 2-4, 08034 Barcelona, Spain

Corresponding author: A. Alibés, aalibes@am.ub.es

Received: 27 December 2000
Accepted: 15 February 2001

Abstract

We have developed a detailed standard chemical evolution model to study the evolution of all the chemical elements up to the iron peak in the solar vicinity. We consider that the Galaxy was formed through two episodes of exponentially decreasing infall, out of extragalactic gas. In a first infall episode, with a duration of ~1 Gyr, the halo and the thick disk were assembled out of primordial gas, while the thin disk formed in a second episode of infall of slightly enriched extragalactic gas, with much longer timescale. The model nicely reproduces the main observational constraints of the solar neighborhood, and the calculated elemental abundances at the time of the solar birth are in excellent agreement with the solar abundances. By the inclusion of metallicity-dependent yields for the whole range of stellar masses we follow the evolution of 76 isotopes of all the chemical elements between hydrogen and zinc. Those results are compared with a large and recent body of observational data, and we discuss in detail the implications for stellar nucleosynthesis.