In the Milky Way meeting at MPIA today, a bit of a discussion broke out about using stellar twins, inspired by work by Yuan-Sen Ting (OSU). The idea is: If you have two stars with very similar overall metallicity, and very similar temperature and surface gravity, then it should be possible to measure accurate element abundnace anomalies between the two stars, even in the absence of an extremely accurate spectral synthesis code.
My view, which does not contradict this point, is that an even better way to use this stellar-twin idea is to synthesize a twin for every star, using stars that are similar in (either) parameters or else spectral space. After all, an interpolation to your target star should more accurately represent it than even the most similar individual comparison star. That idea, fundamentally, is the main idea behind The Cannon.
No comments:
Post a Comment