Paper detail

Re-grouping stars based on the chemical tagging technique: A case study of M67 and IC4651

The chemical tagging technique proposed by Freeman & Bland-Hawthorn (2002) is based on the idea that stars formed from the same molecular cloud should share the same chemical signature. Thus, using only the chemical composition of stars we should be able to re-group the ones that once belonged to the same stellar aggregate. In Blanco-Cuaresma et al. (2015), we tested the technique on open cluster stars using iSpec (Blanco-Cuaresma et al. 2014a), we demonstrated their chemical homogeneity but we found that the 14 studied elements lead to chemical signatures too similar to reliably distinguish stars from different clusters. This represents a challenge to the technique and a new question was open: Could the inclusion of other elements help to better distinguish stars from different aggregates? With an updated and improved version of iSpec, we derived abundances for 28 elements using spectra from HARPS, UVES and NARVAL archives for the open clusters M67 and IC4651, and we found that the chemical signatures of both clusters are very similar.