Spectroscopic Determination of Capella’s Photospheric Abundances: Possible Influence of Stellar Activity

Abstract

Abstract Capella is a spectroscopic binary consisting of two G-type giants, where the primary (G8 iii) is a normal red clump giant while the secondary (G0 iii) is a chromospherically active fast rotator showing considerable overabundance of Li as Li-enhanced giants. Recently, Takeda & Tajitsu reported that abundance ratios of specific light elements (e.g., [C/Fe] or [O/Fe]) in Li-rich giants of high activity tend to be anomalously high, which they suspected to be nothing but superficial caused by unusual atmospheric structure due to high activity. Toward verifying this hypothesis, we determined the elemental abundances of the primary and the secondary of Capella based on the disentangled spectrum of each component, in order to see whether any apparent disagreement exists between the two, which should have been formed with the same chemical composition. We found that the primary is slightly supersolar (by ∼+0.1 dex), while the secondary is subsolar (by several tenths of dex) for heavier elements such as Fe, resulting in a marked discrepancy between the primary and secondary, though such a trend is not seen for light elements (e.g., C or O). These observational facts suggest that anomalously large [X/Fe] ratios found in Li-rich giants were mainly due to an apparent decrease of Fe abundance, which we speculate is caused by the overionization effect due to chromospheric UV radiation. We thus conclude that conventional model-atmosphere analysis would fail to correctly determine the abundances of fast-rotating giants of high activity, for which proper treatment of the chromospheric effect is required for deriving true photospheric abundances.