OGLE-ing the Magellanic System: Photometric Metallicity from Fundamental Mode RR Lyrae Stars

TL;DR

This study develops a photometric method to estimate metallicity of RR Lyrae stars using OGLE-IV data, revealing metallicity distributions and gradients in the Magellanic Clouds without spectroscopic observations.

Contribution

It introduces a new relation between [Fe/H] and the phase parameter 1 for I-band light curves, enabling metallicity mapping from photometry alone.

Findings

Median [Fe/H] is -1.39 dex for LMC and -1.77 dex for SMC.

Detected a metallicity gradient in the LMC but not in the SMC.

Metal-rich RRab stars are more centrally concentrated in the SMC.

Abstract

In an era of extensive photometric observations, the catalogs of RR Lyr type variable stars number tens of thousands of objects. The relation between the iron abundance [Fe/H] and the Fourier parameters of the stars light curve allows us to investigate mean metallicities and metallicity gradients in various stellar environments, independently of time-consuming spectroscopic observations. In this paper we use almost 6500 $V$- and $I$-band light curves of fundamental mode RR Lyr stars from the OGLE-IV survey to provide a relation between the $V$- and $I$-band phase parameter $\varphi_{31}$ used to estimate [Fe/H]. The relation depends on metallicity, which limits its applicability. We apply this relation to metallicity formulae developed for the Johnson $V$- and the Kepler $Kp$-band to obtain the relation between [Fe/H] and $\varphi_{31}$ for the $I$-band photometry. Last, we apply the new relation of Nemec to the OGLE-IV fundamental mode RR Lyr stars data and construct a metallicity map of the Magellanic Clouds. Median [Fe/H] is $-1.39\pm0.44$ dex for the LMC and $-1.77\pm0.48$ dex for the SMC, on the Jurcsik metallicity scale. We also find a metallicity gradient within the LMC with a slope of $-0.029\pm0.002$ dex/kpc in the inner 5 kpc and $-0.030 \pm0.003$ dex/kpc beyond 8 kpc, and no gradient in-between ($-0.019\pm0.002$ dex/kpc integrally). We do not observe a metallicity gradient in the SMC, although we show that the metal-rich RRab stars are more concentrated toward the SMC center than the metal-poor.