Element abundances of galactic RGB stars in the APO-K2 catalogue. Dissimilarity in the scaling with [$\alpha$/Fe]

TL;DR

This study analyzes the chemical abundances of over 4,000 RGB stars from the APO-K2 catalogue, revealing a significant difference in the [$ ext{C+N+O}$]/Fe versus [$ ext{α}$/Fe] trend, especially for oxygen, with minimal impact on stellar evolution timescales.

Contribution

It identifies a dissimilarity in the [$ ext{C+N+O}$]/Fe and [$ ext{α}$/Fe] scaling, particularly for oxygen, challenging the standard uniform $ ext{α}$-enhancement assumption.

Findings

Oxygen shows a steeper increase with [$ ext{α}$/Fe] than other elements.

The oxygen over-abundance has limited effect on stellar evolutionary timescales.

The [$ ext{C+N+O}$]/Fe trend differs significantly from simple $ ext{α}$-enhancement models.

Abstract

We conducted an investigation on the chemical abundances of 4,316 stars in the red giant branch (RGB) phase from the recently released APO-K2 catalogue. Our aim was to characterize the abundance trends of the single elements with [$\alpha$/Fe], mainly focusing on C, N, and O, which are the most relevant for the estimation of stellar ages. The chemical analysis of the RGB sample involved cross-matching data from the APO-K2 catalogue with individual element abundances from APOGEE DR17. The analysis detected a statistically significant difference in the [(C+N+O)/Fe] - [$\alpha$/Fe] trend with respect to the simple $\alpha$-enhancement scenario. This difference remained robust across different choices for the reference solar mixture and potential zero-point calibrations of C and N abundances. The primary discrepancy was a steeper increase in [O/Fe] with [$\alpha$/Fe], reaching a 0.1 dex difference at [$\alpha$/Fe] = 0.3. Notably, the impact on the evolutionary timescale of such oxygen over-abundance with respect to the commonly adopted uniform $\alpha$-enhancement is rather limited. We verified that stellar models computed using an ad hoc O-rich mixture sped up the evolution by only 1% at [$\alpha$/Fe] = 0.3, due to the counterbalancing effects of O enrichment on both the evolutionary timescale and the Z-to-[Fe/H] relationship.