Chemistry Commons^™

Searching For Chemical Signatures Of Multiple Stellar Populations In The Old, Massive Open Cluster Ngc 6791, Angela Bragaglia, Christopher Sneden, Eugenio Carretta, Raffaele G. Gratton, Sara Lucatello, Peter F. Bernath, James S. A. Brooke, Ram S. Ram

Chemistry & Biochemistry Faculty Publications

Galactic open and globular clusters (OCs, GCs) appear to inhabit separate regions of the age-mass plane. However, the transition between them is not easily defined because there is some overlap between high-mass, old OCs and low-mass, young GCs. We are exploring the possibility of a clear-cut separation between OCs and GCs using an abundance feature that has been found so far only in GCs: (anti)correlations between light elements. Among the coupled abundance trends, the Na-O anticorrelation is the most widely studied. These anticorrelations are the signature of self-enrichment, i.e., of a formation mechanism that implies multiple generations of stars. Here …