Improving metallicity estimates for very metal-poor stars in the Gaia DR3 GSP-Spec catalog

TL;DR

This paper improves metallicity estimates for very metal-poor stars in Gaia DR3 by incorporating photometric data, reducing uncertainties, and increasing the number of reliable VMP star measurements.

Contribution

It introduces a method that combines spectroscopic and photometric data to enhance metallicity accuracy for VMP stars in Gaia DR3.

Findings

Recovered Ca triplet equivalent widths agree with direct measurements with 0.05 dex scatter.

Metallicity uncertainties at low metallicity are reduced to 0.18 dex, half of previous estimates.

Number of reliable VMP star metallicities increased by a factor of 2-3.

Abstract

The Gaia DR3 GSP-Spec parameters, including metallicity, for VMP stars suffer from parameter degeneracy due to a lack of information in their spectra. Furthermore, the recommended quality cuts filter out the majority of the VMP stars because some of them are confused with hot stars or cool K and M-type giants. We aim to provide more precise metallicity estimates for VMP stars analysed by the GSP-Spec module by taking photometric information into account in the analysis. We reanalyzed FGK type stars in the GSP-Spec catalog by computing the Ca triplet equivalent widths from the published set of GSP-Spec stellar parameters. We compare these recovered equivalent widths with the values directly measured from public Gaia RVS spectra and investigate the precision of the recovered values and the parameter range in which the recovered values are reliable. We then convert the recovered equivalent widths to metallicities adopting photometric temperatures and surface gravities. The recovered equivalent widths agree with the directly measured values with a scatter of 0.05 dex for the stars that pass the GSP-Spec quality cuts. At the low metallicity end ([Fe/H]$<-1.5$), our metallicity estimates have a typical uncertainty of 0.18 dex, which is about half of the quoted GSP-Spec metallicity uncertainty at the same metallicity. Our metallicities also show better agreement with the high-resolution literature values than the original GSP-Spec metallicities at low metallicity. While the GSP-Spec metallicities show increasing scatter when misidentified ``hot'' stars and the subsets of the ``cool K and M-type giants'' are included, we can now identify them as FGK-type stars and provide metallicities that show a small scatter in the comparisons. Thanks to the recovery of these originally misclassified stars, we increase the number of VMP stars with reliable metallicity by a factor of $2-3$.