A spectroscopic study of the open cluster NGC 6250

TL;DR

This study analyzes the chemical abundances of 19 stars in the young open cluster NGC 6250 to test atomic diffusion theories, developing new software tools for stellar abundance analysis using VLT spectra.

Contribution

It introduces a new software suite for stellar chemical abundance analysis and applies it to NGC 6250, providing refined stellar and cluster parameters.

Findings

No significant correlation between element abundances and cluster age.

Potential increase in Ba abundance with age.

Software effectively analyzes large stellar spectral datasets.

Abstract

We present the chemical abundance analysis of 19 upper main-sequence stars of the young open cluster NGC 6250 (log t ~ 7.42 yr). This work is part of a project aimed at setting observational constraints on the theory of atomic diffusion in stellar photospheres, by means of a systematic study of the abundances of the chemical elements of early F-, A- and late B-type stars of well-determined age. Our data set consists of low-, medium- and high-resolution spectra obtained with the Fibre Large Array Multi Element Spectrograph (FLAMES) instrument of the ESO Very Large Telescope (VLT). To perform our analysis, we have developed a new suite of software tools for the chemical abundance analysis of stellar photospheres in local thermodynamical equilibrium. Together with the chemical composition of the stellar photospheres, we have provided new estimates of the cluster mean radial velocity, proper motion, refined the cluster membership, and we have given the stellar parameters including masses and fractional age. We find no evidence of statistically significant correlation between any of the parameters, including abundance and cluster age, except perhaps for an increase in Ba abundance with cluster age. We have proven that our new software tool may be successfully used for the chemical abundance analysis of large data sets of stellar spectra.