2009/11/04 by H.‐G. Ludwig, H. -G. Ludwig, E. Caffau +3
Physics and Astronomy · #Abundance (ecology) #Astronomical and nuclear sciences #Astronomy #Astrophysics #Bottleneck #Computer science #Gamma-ray bursts and supernovae #Nucleosynthesis #Physics #Spectroscopy #Stars #Stellar evolution #Stellar nucleosynthesis #Stellar, planetary, and galactic studies #astro-ph.IM
paper · pdf · doi:10.1051/0004-6361/200810780
Accepted for publication in A&A
openalex publication_date 2009/11/04 · arxiv created 2009/11/22 · arxiv updated 2015/05/14 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
<i>Context. <i/>Combined spectroscopic abundance analyses of stable and radioactive elements can be applied for deriving stellar ages. The achievable precision depends on factors related to spectroscopy, nucleosynthesis, and chemical evolution.<i>Aims. <i/>We quantify the uncertainties arising from the spectroscopic analysis, and compare these to the other error sources.<i>Methods. <i/>We derive formulae for the age uncertainties arising from the spectroscopic abundance analysis, and apply them to spectroscopic and nucleosynthetic data compiled from the literature for the Sun and metal-poor stars.<i>Results. <i/>We obtained ready-to-use analytic formulae of the age uncertainty for the cases of stable+unstable and unstable+unstable chronometer pairs, and discuss the optimal relation between to-be-measured age and mean lifetime of a radioactive species. Application to the literature data indicates that, for a single star, the achievable spectroscopic accuracy is limited to about <i>±<i/>20% for the foreseeable future. At present, theoretical uncertainties in nucleosynthesis and chemical evolution models form the precision bottleneck. For stellar clusters, isochrone fitting provides a higher accuracy than radioactive dating, but radioactive dating becomes competitive when applied to many cluster members simultaneously, reducing the statistical errors by a factor .<i>Conclusions. <i/>Spectroscopy-based radioactive stellar dating would benefit from improvements in the theoretical understanding of nucleosynthesis and chemical evolution. Its application to clusters can provide strong constraints for nucleosynthetic models.