Chemical Abundance Analysis of Three α-poor, Metal-poor Stars in the Ultrafaint Dwarf Galaxy Horologium i
Reproduced with permission of AAS ; We present chemical abundance measurements of three stars in the ultrafaint dwarf galaxy Horologium I, a Milky Way satellite discovered by the Dark Energy Survey. Using high-resolution spectroscopic observations, we measure the metallicity of the three stars, as well as abundance ratios of several α-elements, iron-peak elements, and neutron-capture elements. The abundance pattern is relatively consistent among all three stars, which have a low average metallicity of [Fe/H] ∼ -2.6 and are not α-enhanced ([α/Fe] ∼ 0.0). This result is unexpected when compared to other low-metallicity stars in the Galactic halo and other ultrafaint dwarfs and suggests the possibility of a different mechanism for the enrichment of Hor I compared to other satellites. We discuss possible scenarios that could lead to this observed nucleosynthetic signature, including extended star formation, enrichment by a Population III supernova, and or an association with the Large Magellanic Cloud ; Funding for the DES Projects has been provided by the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Ministry of Science and Education of Spain, the Science and Technology Facilities Council of the United Kingdom, the Higher Education Funding Council for England, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Kavli Institute of Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago, the Center for Cosmology and Astro-Particle Physics at the Ohio State University, the Mitchell Institute for Fundamental Physics and Astronomy at Texas A&M University, Financiadora de Estudos e Projetos, Fundação Carlos Chagas Filho de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico and the Ministério da Ciência, Tecnologia e Inovação, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, and the Collaborating Institutions in the Dark Energy Survey. The DES data management system is supported by the National Science Foundation under grant nos. AST-1138766 and AST-1536171. The DES participants from Spanish institutions are partially supported by MINECO under grants AYA2015-71825, ESP2015-88861, FPA2015-68048, SEV- 2012-0234, SEV-2016-0597, and MDM-2015-0509, some of which include ERDF funds from the European Union. IFAE is partially funded by the CERCA program of the Generalitat de Catalunya. Research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Program (FP7/2007- 2013), including ERC grant agreements 240672, 291329, and 306478. We acknowledge support from the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for All-sky Astrophysics (CAASTRO), through project no. CE110001020