Principal Component Abundance Analysis of Microlensed Bulge Dwarf and Subgiant Stars

TL;DR

This study applies principal component analysis to elemental abundances of microlensed bulge stars, revealing distinct enrichment patterns and similarities with the Galactic disk, providing insights into their formation histories.

Contribution

It introduces principal component abundance analysis (PCAA) to characterize stellar populations and uncovers bimodal abundance patterns in bulge stars.

Findings

Most stars' abundance patterns are described by the first principal component dominated by alpha-elements.

The distribution in PC1 is bimodal, confirming previous findings of bimodality in [Fe/H].

Bulge and disk stars show similar alpha-enrichment histories, but differ in s-process contributions.

Abstract

Elemental abundance patterns can provide vital clues to the formation and enrichment history of a stellar population. Here we present an investigation of the Galactic bulge, where we apply principal component abundance analysis (PCAA)---a principal component decomposition of relative abundances [X/Fe]---to a sample of 35 microlensed bulge dwarf and subgiant stars, characterizing their distribution in the 12-dimensional space defined by their measured elemental abundances. The first principal component PC1, which suffices to describe the abundance patterns of most stars in the sample, shows a strong contribution from alpha-elements, reflecting the relative contributions of Type II and Type Ia supernovae. The second principal component PC2 is characterized by a Na--Ni correlation, the likely product of metallicity-dependent Type II supernova yields. The distribution in PC1 is bimodal, showing that the bimodality previously found in the [Fe/H] values of these stars is robustly and independently recovered by looking at only their relative abundance patterns. The two metal-rich stars that are alpha-enhanced have outlier values of PC2 and PC3, respectively, further evidence that they have distinctive enrichment histories. Applying PCAA to a sample of local thin and thick disk dwarfs yields a nearly identical PC1; in PC1, the metal-rich and metal-poor bulge dwarfs track kinematically selected thin and thick disk dwarfs, respectively, suggesting broadly similar alpha-enrichment histories. However, the disk PC2 is dominated by a Y--Ba correlation, likely indicating a greater contribution of s-process enrichment from long-lived asymptotic giant branch stars that is absent from the bulge PC2 because of its rapid formation.