* Astronomy

Title: A New Technique for Determining Europium Abundances in Solar-Metallicity Stars
Authors: Kathryn M. G. Peek
(Version v2)

We 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 chi-square-minimisation 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 our method generates smaller errors.

Read more  (1209kb, PDF)