At the same age, metallicity, and alpha-enhancement, sodium is a more effective tracer of the young and old sequences of the Milky Way disc

TL;DR

This study reveals that sodium abundance is a more effective tracer than magnesium for distinguishing between young and old stellar populations in the Milky Way disc, especially at high metallicities, aiding galactic archaeology.

Contribution

Introduces a novel sodium-based method for separating Milky Way disc populations, outperforming traditional magnesium-based approaches at super solar metallicities.

Findings

Na abundance increases with age at high metallicity.

Na-based selection better separates disc populations than Mg-based methods.

New method improves understanding of Milky Way disc formation.

Abstract

Trends in the enrichment of elements with stellar ages are a powerful avenue to identify unexplained origins of the elements. We investigate the stellar abundance trends of low to intermediate-mass stars using the GALAH DR3 high-resolution spectroscopic dataset of 6234 solar-type stars. Our study explores the elemental abundance [X/Fe] of sodium (Na) with age. We find a pronounced enrichment in [Na/Fe] at super solar metallicity (i.e., [Fe/H] above 0) in the old sequence of Milky Way disc stars, a trend demanding a deeper understanding of the underlying source(s) responsible for the nucleosynthesis. This progressive [Na/Fe] enrichment at the young end of the old sequence has essential implications for Galactic archaeology. In this work, we propose a novel selection technique for separating the Milky Way's thick and thin disc stellar populations (i.e., old and young sequences) based on the observed [Na/Fe] rise of roughly 0.1 dex for stars around 5 - 8 Gyr old. We also compare our selection method to the conventional [Mg/Fe] vs [Fe/H] selection approach, and we find that our new Na-based selection method better disentangles the overlap between young- and old-sequence disc stars at these intermediate ages. This is especially true at super solar [Fe/H], where [Mg/Fe] vs [Fe/H] or [alpha/Fe] vs [Fe/H] separation approaches exhibit a lot of overlap. This new selection method should help us better understand the Milky Way disc's formation history.