Stellar Abundances in the Solar Neighborhood: The Hypatia Catalog

TL;DR

The Hypatia Catalog compiles and analyzes spectroscopic abundance data for 50 elements across over 3000 stars in the solar neighborhood, revealing abundance trends and variations within the Galactic disk.

Contribution

This work provides the first comprehensive, normalized catalog of stellar abundances in the solar neighborhood, enabling detailed analysis of chemical distributions and Galactic structure.

Findings

Stars near the mid-plane are more Fe-rich but deficient in certain alpha elements.

Abundance measurements vary significantly across different literature sources.

The catalog reveals an asymmetric distribution of stellar abundances.

Abstract

We compile spectroscopic abundance data from 84 literature sources for 50 elements across 3058 stars in the solar neighborhood, within 150 pc of the Sun, to produce the Hypatia Catalog. We evaluate the variability of the spread in abundance measurements reported for the same star by different surveys. We also explore the likely association of the star within the Galactic disk, the corresponding observation and abundance determination methods for all catalogs in Hypatia, the influence of specific catalogs on the overall abundance trends, and the effect of normalizing all abundances to the same solar scale. The resulting large number of stellar abundance determinations in the Hypatia Catalog are analyzed only for thin-disk stars with observations that are consistent between literature sources. As a result of our large dataset, we find that the stars in the solar neighborhood may be reveal an asymmetric abundance distribution, such that a [Fe/H]-rich group near to the mid-plane is deficient in Mg, Si, S, Ca, Sc II, Cr II, and Ni as compared to stars further from the plane. The Hypatia Catalog has a wide number of applications, including exoplanet hosts, thick and thin disk stars, or stars with different kinematic properties.