The WAGGS project - II. The reliability of the calcium triplet as a metallicity indicator in integrated stellar light

TL;DR

This study evaluates the calcium triplet's effectiveness as a metallicity indicator in integrated stellar light, demonstrating its reliability for older populations and its sensitivity to stellar mass function at low metallicities.

Contribution

It provides empirical calibrations of the calcium triplet index with [Fe/H] and [Ca/H], highlighting its reliability for populations older than 3 Gyr and analyzing its sensitivity to various stellar parameters.

Findings

CaT correlates more tightly with [Ca/H] than [Fe/H].

CaT reliably measures [Ca/H] for populations older than 3 Gyr.

CaT sensitivity varies with age, metallicity, and stellar mass function.

Abstract

Using data from the WiFeS Atlas of Galactic Globular cluster Spectra we study the behaviour of the calcium triplet (CaT), a popular metallicity indicator in extragalactic stellar population studies. A major caveat of these studies is that the potential sensitivity to other stellar population parameters such as age, calcium abundance and the initial mass function has not yet been empirically evaluated. Here we present measurements of the strength of the CaT feature for 113 globular clusters in the Milky Way and its satellite galaxies. We derive empirical calibrations between the CaT index and both the iron abundance ([Fe/H]) and calcium abundance ([Ca/H]), finding a tighter relationship for [Ca/H] than for [Fe/H]. For stellar populations 3 Gyr and older the CaT can be used to reliably measure [Ca/H] at the 0.1 dex level but becomes less reliable for ages of $\sim 2$ Gyr and younger. We find that the CaT is relatively insensitive to the horizontal branch morphology. The stellar mass function however affects the CaT strengths significantly only at low metallicities. Using our newly derived empirical calibration, we convert our measured CaT indices into [Ca/H] values for the globular clusters in our sample.