Prospects of measuring a metallicity trend and spread in globular clusters from low-resolution spectroscopy

TL;DR

This study explores the potential of low-resolution spectroscopy combined with full-spectrum fitting to measure metallicity trends and spreads in globular clusters, highlighting current limitations and future prospects.

Contribution

It demonstrates the feasibility of deriving stellar metallicities from low-resolution spectra using synthetic libraries, and compares the results with empirical libraries to identify current challenges.

Findings

Full-spectrum fitting yields consistent metallicity measurements.

Metallicity increases along the sub-giant branch, contrasting previous empirical library results.

Current precision (~0.05 dex) is insufficient to detect intrinsic abundance spreads.

Abstract

The metallicity spread, or the metallicity trend along the evolutionary sequence of a globular cluster, is a rich source of information to help understand the cluster physics (e.g. multiple populations) and stellar physics (e.g. atomic diffusion). Low-resolution integral-field-unit spectroscopy in the optical with the MUSE is an attractive prospect if it can provide these diagnostics because it allows us to extract spectra of a large fraction of the cluster stars. We investigate the possibilities of full-spectrum fitting to derive stellar parameters and chemical abundances at low spectral resolution (R~2000). We reanalysed 1584 MUSE spectra of 1061 stars above the turn-off of NGC 6397 using FERRE and employing two different synthetic libraries. We derive the equivalent iron abundance \fehe for fixed values of \afe. We find that (i) the interpolation schema and grid mesh are not critical for the precision, metallicity spread, and trend; (ii) with the two grids, \fehe increases by ~0.2 dex along the sub-giant branch, starting from the turn-off of the main sequence; (iii) restricting the wavelength range to the optical decreases the precision significantly; and (iv) the precision obtained with the synthetic libraries is lower than the precision obtained previously with empirical libraries. Full-spectrum fitting provides reproducible results that are robust to the choice of the reference grid of synthetic spectra and to the details of the analysis. The \fehe increase along the sub-giant branch is in stark contrast with the nearly constant iron abundance previously found with empirical libraries. The precision of the measurements (0.05 dex on \fehe) is currently not sufficient to assess the intrinsic chemical abundance spreads, but this may change with deeper observations. Improvements of the synthetic spectra are still needed to deliver the full possibilities of full-spectrum fitting.