A New Technique for Determining Europium Abundances in Solar-Metallicity Stars

TL;DR

This paper introduces an automated, high-precision method for measuring europium abundances in solar-metallicity stars using LTE synthetic spectra and chi-square minimization, improving consistency and accuracy over previous techniques.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel automated technique for europium abundance determination that reduces errors and enables large-scale stellar analysis.

Findings

Results are consistent with literature measurements.

The method yields smaller errors than previous approaches.

Applicable to large stellar samples for chemical abundance studies.

Abstract

We present a new technique for measuring the abundance of europium, a representative r-process element, in solar-metallicity stars. Our algorithm compares LTE synthetic spectra with high-resolution observational spectra using a chi-square-minimization routine. The analysis is fully automated, and therefore allows consistent measurement of blended lines even across very large stellar samples. We compare our results with literature europium abundance measurements and find them to be consistent; we also find our method generates smaller errors.