Probing the strength of radial migration via churning by using metal-rich red giant stars from APOGEE

TL;DR

This study uses APOGEE data to analyze radial migration in the Milky Way, finding evidence of churning and blurring processes in metal-rich red giant stars, highlighting migration's role in shaping stellar populations.

Contribution

It provides new observational evidence of radial migration mechanisms, especially churning, in the Milky Way using a large sample of metal-rich red giant stars.

Findings

Most super metal-rich stars experienced churning with Rg >= 5 kpc.

About half of these stars are on non-circular orbits, indicating blurring.

Super metal-rich stars have similar age distributions across radii, supporting migration's role.

Abstract

Making use of the APOGEE DR17 catalogue with high quality data for 143,509 red giant branch stars we explore the strength of different mechanisms that causes a star to radially migrate in the Milky Way stellar disk. At any position in the disk we find stars that are more metal-rich than the local interstellar medium. This is surprising and normally attributed to the migration of these stars after their formation inside their current Galactocentric-radius. Such stars are prime candidates for studying the strength of different migratory processes. We specifically select two types of metal-rich stars: i) super metal-rich stars ([Fe/H] > 0.2) and ii) stars that are more metal-rich than their local environment. For both, we explore the distribution of orbital parameters and ages as evidence of their migration history. We find that most super metal-rich stars have experienced some amount of churning as they have orbits with Rg >= 5 kpc. Furthermore, about half of the super metal-rich stars are on non-circular orbits (ecc > 0.15) and therefore also have experienced blurring. The metallicity of young stars in our sample is generally the same as the metallicity of the interstellar medium, suggesting they have not radially migrated yet. Stars with lower metallicity than the local environment have intermediate to old ages. We further find that super metal-rich stars have approximately the same age distribution at all Galactocentric-radii, which suggests that radial migration is a key mechanism responsible for the chemical compositions of stellar populations in the Milky Way.