Project: PHOTO2CHEM
Title: Stellar chemistry from photometric narrow-band imaging
Period: 1. 7. 2019 - 31. 3. 2022
Host Institution: University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Mathematics and Physics
Principal investigator: Tomaž Zwitter
Research activity: Physics
Project description:
Strong metallic absorption lines can absorb much of the flux in a stellar atmosphere, so its metallic content can be inferred from a contrast between fluxes in narrow-band images centered on and off these lines. This classical idea has been hampered by unknown values of stellar parameters which also influence line strengths. But Gaia results published last spring accurately determine stellar temperatures and luminosities, though their chemistry remains largely unknown.
This project is a pilot observational study to check if narrow-band photometry can be used to recover chemistry of a majority of stars observed by Gaia across the parameter space and across the Galaxy, of PLATO exoplanet hosts and of the planned GaiaNIR mission targets. This study is aimed to make a critical improvement of results of the on-going Gaia mission. Its results will be important also for preparation of target lists and for interpretation of results of future missions PLATO and GaiaNIR (a successor of Gaia) for which no on-board spectroscopy is planned.
