A New Technique for Determining Europium Abundances in Solar-Metallicity Stars

摘要

We present a new technique for measuring the abundance of europium, arepresentative r-process element, in solar-metallicity stars. Our algorithmcompares LTE synthetic spectra with high-resolution observational spectra usinga chi-square-minimization routine. The analysis is fully automated, andtherefore allows consistent measurement of blended lines even across very largestellar samples. We compare our results with literature europium abundancemeasurements and find them to be consistent; we also find our method generatessmaller errors.