Study of Neutron-Capture Element Abundances in Metal-Poor Stars

TL;DR

This study analyzes neutron-capture element abundances in 30 metal-poor stars to understand the contributions of main and weak r-processes, revealing stable patterns and the mixture of processes shaping elemental abundances.

Contribution

It introduces a method to quantify the contributions of main and weak r-processes to metal-poor star abundances using component coefficients, providing new insights into nucleosynthesis processes.

Findings

Metal-poor stars contain contributions from both main and weak r-processes.

The abundance pattern of weak r-process is stable across certain stars.

Some stars' abundances can be explained by a mixture of two r-process components.

Abstract

This work describes a study of elemental abundances for 30 metal-poor stars whose chemical abundances provide excellent information for setting constraints on models of neutron-capture processes. Based on the abundances of main r- and weak r-process stars, the abundance patterns of main r-process and weak r-process are obtained. The two r-process component coefficients are defined to determine the relative contributions from individual neutron-capture process to abundances of metal-poor stars. Based on the component coefficients, we find that metal-poor stars BD+4 2621 and HD 4306 are also weak r-process stars, which means that the abundance pattern produced by weak r-process is stable. All metal-poor star abundances contain the contributions of both main r-process and weak r-process. The elements produced by weak r-process have increased along with Fe over the polluted history. Most of the metal-poor star abundances do not follow the pattern observed in solar system, but there is a small fraction that do. For the low-[Sr/Fe] star BD-18 5550 ([Sr/Fe]$\lesssim-1$), neutron-capture element abundances can be explained by the mixture of two r-process components. Since lighter elements in this star cannot be fitted by the two components, the abundance pattern of P-component is estimated from those abundances.