Spectroscopic Determination of Capella's Photospheric Abundances: Possible Influence of Stellar Activity

TL;DR

This study investigates how stellar activity influences spectroscopic abundance measurements in the binary system Capella, revealing that high activity can cause apparent abundance discrepancies due to chromospheric effects.

Contribution

It demonstrates that chromospheric UV radiation affects abundance determinations in active giants, highlighting the need for models that incorporate chromospheric effects for accurate results.

Findings

Primary is slightly supersolar in Fe, secondary is subsolar, indicating abundance discrepancies.

Discrepancies are not seen for light elements like C or O.

Chromospheric UV radiation likely causes overionization, affecting abundance measurements.

Abstract

Capella is a spectroscopic binary consisting of two G-type giants, where the primary (G8III) is a normal red-clump giant while the secondary (G0III) is a chromospherically-active fast rotator showing considerable overabundance of Li as Li-enhanced giants. Recently, Takeda & Tajitsu (2017) reported that abundance ratios of specific light elements (e.g., [C/Fe] or [O/Fe]) in Li-rich giants of high activity tend to be anomalously high, which they suspected to be nothing but superficial caused by unusual atmospheric structure due to high activity. Towards verifying this hypothesis, we determined the elemental abundances of the primary and the secondary of Capella based on the disentangled spectrum of each component, in order to see whether any apparent disagreement exists between the two, which should have been formed with the same chemical composition. We found that the primary is slightly supersolar (by ~+0.1dex) while the secondary is subsolar (by several tenths dex) for heavier elements such as Fe, resulting in a marked discrepancy between the primary and secondary, though such a trend is not seen for light elements (e.g., C or O). These observational facts suggest that anomalously large [X/Fe] ratios found in Li-rich giants were mainly due to an apparent decrease of Fe abundance, which we speculate is caused by the overionization effect due to chromospheric UV radiation. We thus conclude that conventional model atmosphere analysis would fail to correctly determine the abundances of fast-rotating giants of high activity, for which proper treatment of chromospheric effect is required for deriving true photospheric abundances.