The Long-term Evolution of the Galactic Disk Traced by Dissolving Star Clusters

TL;DR

This paper investigates how star clusters disperse and migrate within the Galactic disk over cosmic time, using chemical tagging to constrain the extent of radial diffusion and migration driven by spiral arm dynamics.

Contribution

It demonstrates that star clusters up to 10^4 solar masses are chemically homogeneous and can serve as tracers to measure radial migration in the Galactic disk.

Findings

Clusters of ~10^4 solar masses are chemically homogeneous.

Chemical tagging can identify star clusters and trace their migration.

The distribution of stars from clusters constrains radial diffusion rates.

Abstract

The Galactic disk retains a vast amount of information about how it came to be, and how it evolved over cosmic time. However, we know very little about the secular processes associated with disk evolution. One major uncertainty is the extent to which stars migrate radially through the disk, thereby washing out signatures of their past (e.g. birth sites). Recent theoretical work finds that such "blurring" of the disk can be important if spiral arms are transient phenomena. Here we describe an experiment to determine the importance of diffusion from the Solar circle with cosmic time. Consider a star cluster that has been placed into a differentially rotating, stellar fluid. We show that all clusters up to ~10^4 solar masses, and a significant fraction of those up to ~10^5 solar masses, are expected to be chemically homogeneous, and that clusters of this size can be assigned a unique "chemical tag" by measuring the abundances of <~10 independent element groups, with better age and orbit determinations allowing fewer abundance measurements. The star cluster therefore acts like a "tracer dye", and the present-day distribution of its stars provides a strong constraint on the rate of radial diffusion or migration in the Galactic disk. Sellwood & Binney have argued for strong radial transport driven by transient spiral perturbations: in principle, we could measure the strength of this migration directly.