The Gaia-ESO Survey: Lithium enrichment histories of the Galactic thick and thin disc

Abstract

Lithium abundance in most of the warm metal-poor main sequence stars shows a constarnt plateau (A(Li) ~ 2.2 dex) and then the upper envelope of the lithium vs. metallicity distribution increases as we approach solar metallicity. Meteorites, which carry information about the chemical composition of the interstellar medium (ISM) at the solar system formation time, show a lithium abundance A(Li) ~ 3.26 dex. This pattern reflects the Li enrichment history of the ISM during the Galaxy lifetime. After the initial Li production in big bang nucleosynthesis, the sources of the enrichment include asymptotic giant branch (AGB) stars, low-mass red giants, novae, type II supernovae, and Galactic cosmic rays. The total amount of enriched Li is sensitive to the relative contribution of these sources. Thus different Li enrichment histories are expected in the Galactic thick and thin disc. We investigate the main sequence stars observed with UVES in Gaia-ESO Survey iDR4 catalogue and find a Li-anticorrelation independent of [Fe/H], T, and log(g). Since in stellar evolution different α enhancements at the same metallicity do not lead to a measurable Li abundance change, the anticorrelation indicates that more Li is produced during the Galactic thin disc phase than during the Galactic thick disc phase. We also find a correlation between the abundance of Li and s-process elements Ba and Y, and they both decrease above the solar metallicity, which can be explained in the framework of the adopted Galactic chemical evolution models.© ESO 2018. ; This work is based on data products from observations made with ESO Telescopes at the La Silla Paranal Observatory under programme ID 188. B-3002 and 193. B-0936. These data products have been processed by the Cambridge Astronomy Survey Unit (CASU) at the Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge, and by the FLAMES/UVES reduction team at INAF/Osservatorio Astrofisico di Arcetri. Data used her were obtained from the Gaia-ESO Survey Data Archive, prepared and hosted by the Wide Field Astronomy Unit, Institute for Astronomy, University of Edinburgh, which is funded by the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council. This work was partly supported by the European Union FP7 programme through ERC grant number 320360 and by the Leverhulme Trust through grant RPG-2012-541. We acknowledge the support from INAF and Ministero dell' Istruzione, dell' Universita' e della Ricerca (MIUR) in the form of the grant >Premiale VLT 2012>. The results presented here benefit from discussions held during the Gaia-ESO workshops and conferences supported by the ESF (European Science Foundation) through the GREAT Research Network Programme. This research has made use of the TOPCAT catalogue handling and plotting tool (Taylor 2005, 2017); of the Simbad database and the VizieR catalogue access tool, CDS, Strasbourg, France (Ochsenbein et al. 2000); and of NASA's Astrophysics Data System. X. F acknowledges helpful discussions with Nikos Prantzos and Paolo Molaro, and thanks Zhiyu Zhang for the help on MCMC calculations. E. D. M. and S. G. S. acknowledge the support from Fundacao para a Ciencia e a Tecnologia (FCT) through national funds and from FEDER through COMPETE2020 by the following grants: UID/FIS/04434/2013 & POCI-01-0145-FEDER-007672, PTDC/FIS-AST/1526/2014 & POCI-01-0145-FEDER-016886, and PTDC/FIS-AST/7073/2014 & POCI-01-0145-FEDER-016880. E. D. M. and S. G. S. also acknowledge the support from FCT through Investigador FCT contracts IF/00849/2015/CP1273/CT003 and IF/00028/2014/CP1215/CT0002. C. A. acknowledges to the Spanish grant AYA2015-63588-P within the European Founds for Regional Development (FEDER). A. K. and T. B. acknowledge the project grant >The New Milky Way> from the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation. R. S. acknowledges support from the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education.