nai

Project Progress

This project is completed. One manuscript describing the Hypatia Catalog was submitted for publication in the Astronomical Journal, and a second manuscript applying the Hypatia Catalog to exoplanet hosts is about to be submitted. Graduate student Natalie Hinkel graduated in December 2011, and Dr. Hinkel started a postdoctoral scholar position with the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute at Caltech.

The first manuscript compiled spectroscopic abundance data from 50 literature sources for 46 elements across 2836 stars in the solar neighborhood, within 150 pc of the Sun, to produce the Hypatia Catalog (see Figure 1). We analyzed the variability of the spread in abundance measurements reported for the same star by different surveys, the corresponding stellar atmosphere parameters adopted by the various abundance determination methods, and the effect of normalizing all abundances to the same solar scale. The large number of stellar abundance determinations in the Hypatia Catalog also allows us to quantify the magnitude of the scatter about the mean abundance trend for each element (see Figure 2). No systematic correlations were found between stellar abundances and position, distance, or velocity. The standard abundance figures showing [X/Fe] with respect to [Fe/H] are consistent with other catalogs as well as modern chemical evolution models. The Hypatia Catalog has a wide number of applications, including exoplanet hosts (second manuscript in preparation), thick and thin disk stars, or stars with different kinematic properties.