2023-06-01

co-writing

My only real work time today came at the end of the day, working with Emily Griffith (Colorado) on our paper about element abundance ratios in the SDSS-V APOGEE data. We find (like others) that the abundances can be explained pretty precisely with only two processes. My position (contrary to others) is that this is not because there are two dominant kinds of supernovae! It is because the disk mixes gas quickly in the azimuthal direction, such that a star's properties are mainly set by the (cosmic) time at which it was born, and the radius at which it was born. If I'm right, then you can't really use disk stars to understand process yields, since they are always an ugly mixture of processes. If I am wrong, there's lots more to do!