Paper detail

On the oxygen abundances of M 67 stars from the turn-off point through the red-giant branch

With an aim to examine whether the surface oxygen composition suffers any appreciable change due to evolution-induced mixing of nuclear-processed material in the envelope of red giants, abundance determinations for O/Fe/Ni based on the synthetic spectrum-fitting method were performed by using the moderate-dispersion spectra in the 7770-7792A region (comprising O I 7771-5, Fe I 7780, and Ni I 7788 lines) for 16 stars of the old open cluster M 67 in various evolutionary stages from the turn-off point through the red giant branch. We could not find any meaningful difference in the oxygen abundances between the non-giant group (T_eff > 5000 K) and the red-giant group (T_eff < 5000 K), which are almost consistent with each other on the average (despite that both have rather large dispersions of a few tenths dex caused by insufficient data quality), though only one giant star (S 1054) appears to show an exceptionally low O abundance and thus needs a more detailed study. This result may suggest that oxygen content in the stellar envelope is hardly affected (or changes are insignificant) by the mixing of H-burning products in the red-giant phase, as far as M 67 stars of low mass (~1.3 M_sun) are concerned, which is consistent with the prediction from the conventional stellar evolution theory of first dredge-up.