Cepheid Metallicity in the Leavitt Law (C- MetaLL) survey: VIII: Spectroscopic detection of rare earth dysprosium, erbium, lutetium and thorium in Classical Cepheids

TL;DR

This study provides a comprehensive spectroscopic analysis of 60 Classical Cepheids, detecting rare earth elements and thorium, and examines their chemical abundances and galactic radial gradients, enhancing understanding of stellar composition and Galactic structure.

Contribution

First systematic estimation of dysprosium, erbium, lutetium, and thorium abundances in Cepheids, expanding chemical analysis in the C-MetaLL survey with new spectral lines and data.

Findings

Galactic radial gradient for [Fe/H] is -0.064 dex/kpc.

Heavy neutron-capture elements show diminishing radial trend.

External Cepheids trace specific spiral arms depending on the model.

Abstract

Classical Cepheids are among the most important distance calibrators thanks to the correlation between their period and luminosity, and play a crucial role in the calibration as the first rung of the extragalactic distance ladder. Given their typical age, they also constitute an optimal tracer of the young population in the Galactic disc. We performed a complete spectroscopic analysis of 136 spectra obtained from three different high-resolution spectrographs, for a total of 60 DCEPs. More than half have pulsational periods longer than 15 days, up to 70 days, doubling the number of stars in our sample with P>15d. We derived radial velocities, atmospheric parameters, and chemical abundances for up to 33 different species. We present an updated list of trusted spectroscopic lines for the detection and estimation of chemical abundances. We used this new set to revisit the abundances already published in the context of the C-MetaLL survey and increase the number of available chemical species. For the first time (to our knowledge), we present the estimation of abundances for Cepheids for dysprosium, as well as a systematic estimation of erbium, lutetium, and thorium abundances. We calculated a galactic radial gradient for [Fe/H] with a slope of -0.064 pm 0.002 dex kpc-1, in good agreement with recent literature estimation. The other elements also exhibit a clear negative radial trend, with this effect diminishing and eventually disappearing for heavier neutron-capture elements. Depending on the proposed spiral arms model present in several literature sources, our most external stars agree on tracing either the Perseus, the Norma-Outer, or both the Outer and the association Outer-Scutum-Centaurus arms.