Chemo-Dynamically Tagged Groups of CEMP Stars in the Halo of the Milky Way. I. Untangling the Origins of CEMP-$s$ and CEMP-no Stars

TL;DR

This study classifies 644 CEMP stars into chemo-dynamically tagged groups using Gaia data and analyzes their elemental abundance dispersions to infer their formation environments and origins.

Contribution

It introduces a chemo-dynamical clustering method for CEMP stars and distinguishes their origins based on abundance dispersions and dynamical properties.

Findings

Group I CEMP stars show no significant intra-cluster abundance dispersions.

Group II CEMP stars exhibit low dispersions in carbon and magnesium, indicating common origins.

CEMP-$s$ stars likely acquired their carbon from binary mass transfer, while CEMP-no stars formed in enriched environments.

Abstract

We construct a sample of 644 carbon-enhanced metal-poor (CEMP) stars with abundance analyses based on moderate- to high-resolution spectroscopic studies. Dynamical parameters for these stars are estimated, based on radial velocities, Bayesian parallax-based distance estimates, and proper motions from $Gaia$ EDR3 and DR3, supplemented by additional available information where needed. After separating our sample into the different CEMP morphological groups in the Yoon-Beers Diagram of absolute carbon abundance vs. metallicity, we used the derived specific energies and actions (E, J$_{r}$, J$_{\phi}$, J$_{z}$) to cluster them into Chemo-Dynamically Tagged Groups (CDTGs). We then analyzed the elemental-abundance dispersions within these clusters by comparing them to the dispersion of clusters that were generated at random. We find that, for the Group I (primarily CEMP-$s$ and CEMP-$r/s$) clustered stars, there exist statistically insignificant intra-cluster dispersions in [Fe/H], $[\text{C}/\text{Fe}]_{c}$ (evolution corrected carbon), and [Mg/Fe] when compared to the intra-cluster dispersions of randomly clustered Group I CEMP stars. In contrast, the Group II (primarily CEMP-no) stars exhibit clear similarities in their intra-cluster abundances, with very low, statistically significant, dispersions in $[\text{C}/\text{Fe}]_{c}$. and marginally significant results in [Mg/Fe]. These results strongly indicate that Group I CEMP stars received their carbon enhancements from local phenomena, such as mass transfer from a evolved binary companion in regions with extended star-formation histories, while the CDTGs of Group II CEMP stars formed in low-metallicity environments that had already been enriched in carbon, likely from massive rapidly rotating ultra and hyper metal-poor stars and/or supernovae associated with high-mass early generation stars.