Formation of galactic subsystems in light of the magnesium abundance in field stars: The thick disk

Abstract

The space velocities and Galactic orbital elements of stars calculated from the currently available high-accuracy observations in our summary catalog of spectroscopic magnesium abundances in dwarfs and subgiants in the solar neighborhood are used to identify thick-disk objects. The relative magnesium abundances in thick-disk stars are shown to lie within the range 0.0<[Mg/Fe]<0.5 and to decrease with increasing metallicity starting from [Fe/H]=-1.0. This is interpreted as evidence for a longer duration of the star formation process in the thick disk. We have found vertical gradients in metallicity (grad_Z[Fe/H]=-0.13\pm 0.04 kpc^{-1}) and relative magnesium abundance (grad_Z [Mg/Fe]=0.06\pm 0.02 kpc^{-1}), which can be present in the subsystem only in the case of its formation in a slowly collapsing protogalaxy. The large spread in relative magnesium abundance (-0.3<[Mg/Fe]<0.5) in the stars of the metal-poor "tail" of the thick disk which constitute 8% of the subsystem, can be explained in terms of their formation inside isolated interstellar clouds that interacted weakly with the matter of a single protogalactic cloud. We have found a statistically significant negative radial gradient in relative magnesium abundance in the thick disk (grad_R [Mg/Fe]=-0.03\pm 0.01 kpc^{-1}) instead of the expected positive gradient. The smaller perigalactic orbital radii and the higher eccentricities for magnesium-richer stars, which among other stars, are currently located in a small volume of the Galactic space near the Sun are assumed to be responsible for the gradient inversion. A similar but statistically less significant inversion is also observed in the subsystem for the radial metallicity gradient.