Ripples of Stellar Enrichment (RoSE) -- simulating element production and mixing in the Milky Way star-by-star

TL;DR

The RoSE simulations model element production and mixing in a Milky Way-like galaxy, revealing that nucleosynthetic origins primarily shape elemental abundance correlations in gas and stars.

Contribution

This work introduces detailed star-by-star simulations incorporating all major nucleosynthetic sources to understand galactic chemical structure.

Findings

Nucleosynthetic source composition is the main factor organizing elemental structure.

Elements with similar production channels show strong abundance correlations.

A linear model based on nucleosynthetic origin differences predicts abundance correlations accurately.

Abstract

We present the Ripples of Stellar Enrichment (RoSE) simulations, which follow a Milky Way-like isolated disc galaxy with star-by-star feedback and nucleosynthesis from all significant channels -- Wolf-Rayet stars, type II supernovae, type Ia supernovae, asymptotic giant branch stars, and neutron star mergers. We use these simulations to test how elements' diverse nucleosynthetic origins imprint spatial, temporal, and inter-element abundance correlations in gas and stars. We find that nucleosynthetic source composition is the primary organising principle of elemental structure: elements sharing a dominant production channel exhibit similar spatial statistics and temporal statistics and their abundances are strongly correlated with one another, while mixed-source pairs are much more weakly correlated. We show that a simple linear regression model based only on how element pairs differ in their nucleosynthetic origin is able to predict, with high fidelity, how strongly their abundances correlate, in both interstellar medium gas and coeval stars. Comparison with Milky Way stellar abundance data shows encouraging qualitative agreement, with differences between simulations and observations comparable to the scatter between independent observational datasets. These results provide first-principles that support for a source-driven framework of galactic chemical structure and connect analytic theory, simulations, and stellar abundance observations.