Mince

Abstract

Context. In recent years, Galactic archaeology has become a particularly vibrant field of astronomy, with its main focus set on the oldest stars of our Galaxy. In most cases, these stars have been identified as the most metal-poor. However, the struggle to find these ancient fossils has produced an important bias in the observations -in particular, the intermediate metal-poor stars ( 2.5<[Fe/H]< 1.5) have been frequently overlooked. The missing information has consequences for the precise study of the chemical enrichment of our Galaxy, in particular for what concerns neutron capture elements and it will be only partially covered by future multi object spectroscopic surveys such as WEAVE and 4MOST. Aims. Measuring at Intermediate Metallicity Neutron Capture Elements (MINCE) is gathering the first high-quality spectra (high signal-to-noise ratio, S/N, and high resolution) for several hundreds of bright and metal-poor stars, mainly located in our Galactic halo. Methods. We compiled our selection mainly on the basis of Gaia data and determined the stellar atmospheres of our sample and the chemical abundances of each star. Results. In this paper, we present the first sample of 59 spectra of 46 stars. We measured the radial velocities and computed the Galactic orbits for all stars. We found that 8 stars belong to the thin disc, 15 to disrupted satellites, and the remaining cannot be associated to the mentioned structures, and we call them halo stars. For 33 of these stars, we provide abundances for the elements up to zinc. We also show the chemical evolution results for eleven chemical elements, based on recent models. Conclusions. Our observational strategy of using multiple telescopes and spectrographs to acquire high S/N and high-resolution spectra for intermediate-metallicity stars has proven to be very e cient, since the present sample was acquired over only about one year of observations. Finally, our target selection strategy, after an initial adjustment, proved satisfactory for our purposes.

Beyond the two-infall model

“…François et al 2004;Romano et al 2010;Côté et al 2017;Prantzos et al 2018). This set of yields has been widely used in the literature (Cescutti et al 2007(Cescutti et al , 2022Spitoni et al 2014Spitoni et al , 2015Spitoni et al , 2017Spitoni et al , 2019bMott et al 2013;Vincenzo et al 2019;Palla et al 2022) and has been shown to be able to reproduce the main features of the solar neighbourhood.…”

On the chemical composition of the evolved very bright metal‐poor star HD 1936

“…The distribution of the derived LTE abundances in the study as a function of [Fe/H]. The abundance data are taken from Cescutti et al (2022); Johnson (2002); Mucciarelli et al (2022); Venn et al (2004). Our star and the field stars are denoted by the black and gray filled circles.…”

Mince

“…These adopted uncertainties for T eff and log g are of the order of the standard deviation found between the stellar parameters derived using MyGisFos (Sbordone et al 2014) taken in Cescutti et al (2022) and the stellar parameters obtained by Starhorse (Anders et al 2019). More details can be found in Cescutti et al (2022). The 0.2 km s −1 error on the microturbulence velocity corresponds to the acceptable variation of this parameter, giving abundances of Fe I independently of the excitation potential of the line.…”

“…These are typical uncertainties used to estimate the sensitivity of each parameter on the abundance determination. These adopted uncertainties for T eff and log g are of the order of the standard deviation found between the stellar parameters derived using MyGisFos (Sbordone et al 2014) taken in Cescutti et al (2022) and the stellar parameters obtained by Starhorse (Anders et al 2019). More details can be found in Cescutti et al (2022).…”