SO-IAA Colloquium: What's is the metallicity of cool dwarf stars?

Cool dwarfs are the most numerous stars in the Galaxy and they account for most of its baryonic mass. However, they are likely the least understood main sequence stars. Their complex atmospheres, due to their low temperatures and high surface gravities, have made their spectroscopic study a hard task. Until recently, their basic physical properties, such as radii and mass, were poorly constrained due to the lack of empirical data. Stellar theoretical models were also affected by this and had relied on incomplete or approximate input physics to predict their main characteristics. New methods and analyses have been created in the last decade to obtain what could be considered their least studied property: their metallicity. The abundance of metals in their photospheres can provide key information to better understand the formation and evolution of planets, stars, and our Galaxy. In this talk, I will present the latest works and advances related to the metallicities of M dwarf stars, the challenges that the cool dwarf photospheres still present to us, and discuss what else is needed to obtain precise and consistent abundances for them, as it can be achieved for FGK stars.

 

local contact: Pedro Amado

Date: 
17/10/2019 - 12:30
Speaker: 
Bárbara Rojas-Ayala
Filiation: 
Universidad Andres Bello, Santiago de Chile, Chile (UNAB)


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