Chemical signatures of the first star clusters

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that considering the birth of stars in clusters significantly reduces the expected chemical abundance scatter in early galaxy stars and introduces a method to detect clustering signatures in stellar chemical data.

Contribution

It introduces a stochastic chemical evolution model that accounts for star clusters, revealing reduced abundance scatter and a new statistical test for clustering in stellar chemical signatures.

Findings

Clustered star formation reduces abundance scatter.

High clustering signatures can be detected in small samples.

Clustering enhances the ability to infer supernova yields.

Abstract

The chemical abundance patterns of the oldest stars in the Galaxy are expected to contain residual signatures of the first stars in the early universe. Numerous studies attempt to explain the intrinsic abundance scatter observed in some metal-poor populations in terms of chemical inhomogeneities dispersed throughout the early Galactic medium due to discrete enrichment events. Just how the complex data and models are to be interpreted with respect to "progenitor yields" remains an open question. Here we show that stochastic chemical evolution models to date have overlooked a crucial fact. Essentially all stars today are born in highly homogeneous star clusters and it is likely that this was also true at early times. When this ingredient is included, the overall scatter in the abundance plane [Fe/H] vs. [X/Fe] (C-space), where X is a nucleosynthetic element, can be much less than derived from earlier models. Moreover, for moderately flat cluster mass functions (gamma < 2), and/or for mass functions with a high mass cut-off (M_max > 10^5 M_sun), stars exhibit a high degree of clumping in C-space that can be identified even in relatively small data samples. Since stellar abundances can be modified by mass transfer in close binaries, clustered signatures are essential for deriving the yields of the first supernovae. We present a statistical test to determine whether a given set of observations exhibit such behaviour. Our initial work focusses on two dimensions in C-space, but we show that the clustering signal can be greatly enhanced by additional abundance axes. The proposed experiment will be challenging on existing 8-10m telescopes, but relatively straightforward for a multi-object echelle spectrograph mounted on a 25-40m telescope.