Study of The Abundance Patterns in The Metal-Poor Stellar Stream (1209.5505v1)

Abstract: The chemical abundances of the metal-poor stars in the stellar stream provide important information for setting constraints on models of neutron-capture processes. The study of these stars could give us a better understanding of r-process nucleosynthesis and chemical composition of the early Galaxy. Using the updated main r-process and weak r-process patterns, we fit abundances in the stellar stream stars. The weak r-process component coefficients are almost constant for the sample stars, including r-rich stars, which means that both weak r-process and Fe are produced as primary elements from SNeII and their yields have nearly a constant mass fraction. The difference between the stream stars and r-rich stars is obvious. For the stream stars, that the increase trend in the main r-process component coefficients as metallicity increases means the gradual increase in the production of main r-process elements relative to iron. This behavior implies that the masses of progenitors for the main r-process are smaller than those of the weak r-process. Furthermore, we find metal-poor stream star HD 237846 is a weak r-process star.