Paper detail

The r-process in Magnetorotational Supernovae

One of the hottest open issues involving the evolution of r-process elements is fast enrichment in the early Universe. Clear evidence for the chemical enrichment of r-process elements is seen in the stellar abundances of extremely metal poor stars in the Galactic halo. However, small-mass galaxies are the ideal testbed for studying the evolutionary features of r-process enrichment given the potential rarity of production events yielding heavy r-process elements. Their occurrences become countable and thus an enrichment path due to each event can be found in the stellar abundances. We examine the chemical feature of Eu abundance at an early stage of ${\rm[Fe/H]} \lesssim -2$ in the Draco and Sculptor dwarf spheroidal (dSph) galaxies. Accordingly, we constrain the properties of the Eu production in the early dSphs. We find that the Draco dSph experienced a few Eu production events, whereas Eu enrichment took place more continuously in the Sculptor dSph due to its larger stellar mass. The event rate of Eu production is estimated to be about one per $100$-$200$ core-collapse supernovae, and a Eu mass of $\sim (1-2) \times 10^{-5}$\ms per single event is deduced by associating this frequency with the observed plateau value of ${\rm [Eu/H]} \sim -1.3$ for ${\rm [Fe/H]} \gtrsim -2$. The observed plateau implies that early Eu enrichment ceases at ${\rm [Fe/H]} \approx -2$. Such a selective operation only in low-metallicity stars supports magnetorotational supernovae, which require very fast rotation, as the site of early Eu production. We show that the Eu yields deduced from chemical evolution agree well with the nucleosynthesis results from corresponding supernovae models.