Spectroscopic study of four metal-poor carbon stars from the Hamburg/ESO Survey: On confirming the low-mass nature of their companions

Abstract: Elemental abundances of extrinsic carbon stars provide insight into the poorly understood origin and evolution of elements in the early Galaxy. In this work, we present the results of a detailed spectroscopic analysis of four potential carbon star candidates from the Hamburg/ESO Survey (HES) HE~0457$-$1805, HE~0920$-$0506, HE~1241$-$0337, and HE~1327$-$2116. This analysis is based on the high-resolution spectra obtained with Mercator/HERMES (R$\sim$86,000) and SUBARU/HDS (R$\sim$50,000). Although the abundances of a few elements, such as, Fe, C, and O are available from medium-resolution spectra, we present the first ever detailed high-resolution spectroscopic analysis for these objects. The object HE~0457$-$1805 and HE~1241$-$0337 are found to be CEMP-s stars, HE~0920$-$0506 a CH star, and HE~1327$-$2116 a CEMP-r/s star. The object HE~0457$-$1805 is a confirmed binary, whereas the binary status of the other objects is unknown. The locations of program stars on the absolute carbon abundance A(C) vs [Fe/H] diagram point at their binary nature. We have examined various elemental abundance ratios of the program stars and confirmed the low-mass nature of their former AGB companions. We have shown that the i-process models could successfully reproduce the observed abundance pattern in HE~1327$-$2116. The parametric model based analysis performed for HE~0457$-$1805, HE~0920$-$0506, and HE~1241$-$0337 based on the FRUITY models confirmed that the surface chemical composition of these three objects are influenced by pollution from low-mass AGB companions.