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$\textit{Gaia}$ FGK benchmark stars: opening the black box of stellar element abundance determination

Published version
Peer-reviewed

Type

Article

Change log

Authors

Jofre, P 
Heiter, U 
Worley, CC 
Blanco-Cuaresma, S 
Soubiran, C 

Abstract

Gaia and its complementary spectroscopic surveys combined will yield the most comprehensive database of kinematic and chemical information of stars in the Milky Way. The Gaia FGK benchmark stars play a central role in this matter as they are calibration pillars for the atmospheric parameters and chemical abundances for various surveys. The spectroscopic analyses of the benchmark stars are done by combining different methods, and the results will be affected by the systematic uncertainties inherent in each method. In this paper, we explore some of these systematic uncertainties. We determined line abundances of Ca, Cr, Mn and Co for four benchmark stars using six different methods. We changed the default input parameters of the different codes in a systematic way and found, in some cases, significant differences between the results. Since there is no consensus on the correct values for many of these default parameters, we urge the community to raise discussions towards standard input parameters that could alleviate the difference in abundances obtained by different methods. In this work, we provide quantitative estimates of uncertainties in elemental abundances due to the effect of differing technical assumptions in spectrum modelling.

Description

Keywords

stars: general, line: profiles, methods: data analysis, Galaxy: abundances

Journal Title

Astronomy & Astrophysics

Conference Name

Journal ISSN

0004-6361
1432-0746

Volume Title

601

Publisher

EDP Sciences
Sponsorship
European Research Council (320360)
his work results from a workshop organised in the Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge in February 2016 and was partly supported by the European Union FP7 programme through ERC grant number 320360. We thank the referee for valuable comments on the manuscript. P.J. acknowledges partial support of King’s College Cambridge. U.H. acknowledges support from the Swedish National Space Board (SNSB/Rymdstyrelsen). S.B.C. want to thank Laurent Eyer from the University of Geneva for his support for this work. V.A. acknowledges the support of the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (FCT – Portugal) in the form of the grant SFRH/BPD/70574/2010. V.A. was also supported by FCT through the research grants (ref. PTDC/FIS-AST/7073/2014 and Ref. PTDC/FIS-AST/1526/2014) through national funds and by FEDER through COMPETE2020 (Refs. POCI-01-0145-FEDER-016880 and POCI-01-0145-FEDER-016886). This work has used ESO archive data of the star HD 22879 taken with Programme ID: 080.D-0347(A) (PI: U. Heiter). S.B. acknowledges funds from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in the framework of the Sofja Kovalevskaja Award endowed by the Federal Ministry of Education. LC acknowledges the support by the MINECO (Spanish Ministry of Economy) – FEDER through grant ESP2014-55996-C2-1-R and MDM-2014-0369 of ICCUB (Unidad de Excelencia “María de Maeztu”). L.C. also acknowledges financial support from the University of Barcelona under the APIF grant.