Issue |
A&A
Volume 688, August 2024
|
|
---|---|---|
Article Number | A165 | |
Number of page(s) | 15 | |
Section | Galactic structure, stellar clusters and populations | |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202449938 | |
Published online | 15 August 2024 |
A baseline on the relation between chemical patterns and the birth stellar cluster
1
Instituto de Estudios Astrofísicos, Facultad de Ingeniería y Ciencias, Universidad Diego Portales, Av. Ejercito 441, Santiago, Chile
e-mail: theosamuele.signor@mail.udp.cl
2
Inria Chile Research Center, Av. Apoquindo 2827, Piso 12, Las Condes, Santiago, Chile
3
Millenium Nucleus ERIS, Chile
Received:
11
March
2024
Accepted:
22
May
2024
Context. The chemical composition of a star’s atmosphere reflects the chemical composition of its birth environment. Therefore, it should be feasible to recognize stars born together that have scattered throughout the galaxy, solely based on their chemistry. This concept, known as “strong chemical tagging”, is a major objective of spectroscopic studies, but it has yet to yield the anticipated results.
Aims. We assess the existence and the robustness of the relation between chemical abundances and the birthplace using known member stars of open clusters.
Methods. We followed a supervised machine learning approach, using chemical abundances obtained from APOGEE DR17, observed open clusters as labels, and different data preprocessing techniques.
Results. We find that open clusters can be recovered with any classifier and on data whose features are not carefully selected. In the sample with no field stars, we obtain an average accuracy of 75.2% and we find that the prediction accuracy mostly depends on the uncertainties of the chemical abundances. When field stars outnumber the cluster members, the performance degrades.
Conclusions. Our results show the difficulty of recovering birth clusters using chemistry alone, even in a supervised scenario. This clearly challenges the feasibility of strong chemical tagging. Nevertheless, including information about ages could potentially enhance the possibility of recovering birth clusters.
Key words: stars: abundances / Galaxy: abundances / open clusters and associations: general
© The Authors 2024
Open Access article, published by EDP Sciences, under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
This article is published in open access under the Subscribe to Open model. Subscribe to A&A to support open access publication.
Current usage metrics show cumulative count of Article Views (full-text article views including HTML views, PDF and ePub downloads, according to the available data) and Abstracts Views on Vision4Press platform.
Data correspond to usage on the plateform after 2015. The current usage metrics is available 48-96 hours after online publication and is updated daily on week days.
Initial download of the metrics may take a while.