A New Technique for Determining Europium Abundances in Solar-Metallicity Stars11The data presented herein were obtained at the W. M. Keck Observatory, which is operated as a scientific partnership among the California Institute of Technology, the University of California, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The Observatory was made possible by the generous financial support of the W. M. Keck

Abstract

ABSTRACTWe present a new technique for measuring the abundance of europium, a representative r-process element, in solar-metallicity stars. Our algorithm compares LTE synthetic spectra with high-resolution observational spectra using a χ2-minimization routine. The analysis is fully automated, and therefore allows consistent measurement of blended lines even across very large stellar samples. We compare our results with literature europium abundance measurements and find them to be consistent; we also find that our method generates smaller errors.