Chemical similarities between Galactic bulge and local thick disk red giants: O, Na, Mg, Al, Si, Ca and Ti

TL;DR

This study finds that Galactic bulge and local thick disk red giants share similar chemical compositions for multiple elements, suggesting they experienced comparable formation histories and rapid chemical evolution.

Contribution

It provides the most stringent evidence to date that bulge and thick disk stars have indistinguishable chemical signatures across a broad metallicity range.

Findings

No chemical distinction between bulge and thick disk stars for investigated elements.

Both populations follow the same [α/Fe] vs [Fe/H] trend with minimal scatter.

Shared location of the knee in the [α/Fe] vs [Fe/H] diagram.

Abstract

... We confirm the well-established differences for [$\alpha$/Fe] at a given metallicity between the local thin and thick disks. For all the elements investigated, we find no chemical distinction between the bulge and the local thick disk, in agreement with our previous study of C, N and O but in contrast to other groups relying on literature values for nearby disk dwarf stars. For -1.5 < [Fe/H] < -0.3 exactly the same trend is followed by both the bulge and thick disk stars, with a star-to-star scatter of only 0.03 dex. Furthermore, both populations share the location of the knee in the [alpha/Fe] vs [Fe/H] diagram. It still remains to be confirmed that the local thick disk extends to super-solar metallicities as is the case for the bulge. These are the most stringent constraints to date on the chemical similarity of these stellar populations. Our findings suggest that the bulge and local thick disk stars experienced similar formation timescales, star formation rates and initial mass functions, confirming thus the main outcomes of our previous homogeneous analysis of [O/Fe] from infrared spectra for nearly the same sample. The identical alpha-enhancements of thick disk and bulge stars may reflect a rapid chemical evolution taking place before the bulge and thick disk structures we see today were formed, or it may reflect Galactic orbital migration of inner disk/bulge stars resulting in stars in the solar neighborhood with thick-disk kinematics.