Title: High Precision Differential Spectroscopy and Isotopic Abundances in the Era of Big Data
Speaker: C. Manea (U of Utah) & M. McKenzie (Carnegie Science Observatories)
Abstract:
The Milky Way serves as a laboratory for studying the physical processes that drive galaxy evolution, and its stars act as test tubes preserving chemical samples of our Galaxy across space and time. Because chemical elements are synthesized in stars and their explosions, observed stellar surface compositions trace the legacy of star formation and rare nucleosynthetic events (e.g., neutron-star mergers) that came prior to the star’s birth. The importance of stellar compositions in tracing Galactic history has motivated the development of large spectroscopic surveys that report hundreds of thousands to millions of stellar compositions. However, the moderate resolving power of these spectrographs (R ~20,000) limits the chemical abundance precision that can be obtained. High-resolution spectroscopy (R>60,000) opens a complementary regime, enabling isotopic ratio measurements and abundance uncertainties at the ~2% level. In this talk, we will present recent work that leverages data from large spectroscopic surveys alongside dedicated follow-up from high-resolution spectrographs to probe the origins of the chemical elements, large-scale gas mixing within the interstellar medium, and the chemical evolution of our Milky Way.