The Gaia-ESO Survey: radial metallicity gradients and age-metallicity relation of stars in the Milky Way disk

We study the relationship between age, metallicity, and α-enhancement of FGK stars in the Galactic disk. The results are based upon the analysis of high-resolution UVES spectra from the Gaia-ESO large stellar survey. We explore the limitations of the observed dataset, i.e. the accuracy of stellar parameters and the selection effects that are caused by the photometric target preselection. We find that the colour and magnitude cuts in the survey suppress old metal-rich stars and young metal-poor stars. This suppression may be as high as 97% in some regions of the age-metallicity relationship. The dataset consists of 144 stars with a wide range of ages from 0.5 Gyr to 13.5 Gyr, Galactocentric distances from 6 kpcto 9.5 kpc, and vertical distances from the plane 0 < |Z| < 1.5 kpc. On this basis, we find that i) the observed age-metallicity relation is nearly flat in the range of ages between 0 Gyr and 8 Gyr; ii) at ages older than 9 Gyr, we see a decrease in [Fe/H] and a clear absence of metal-rich stars; this cannot be explained by the survey selection functions; iii) there is a significant scatter of [Fe/H] at any age; and iv) [Mg/Fe] increases with age, but the dispersion of [Mg/Fe] at ages >9 Gyr is not as small as advocated by some other studies. In agreement with earlier work, we find that radial abundance gradients change as a function of vertical distance from the plane. The [Mg/Fe] gradient steepens and becomes negative. In addition, we show that the inner disk is not only more α-rich compared to the outer disk, but also older, as traced independently by the ages and Mg abundances of stars.

This work was partly supported by the European Union FP7 programme through ERC grant number 320360. AS is supported by the MICINN grant AYA2011-24704 and by the ESF EUROCORES Programme EuroGENESIS (MICINN grant EUI2009-04170). The results presented here benefited from discussions held during Gaia-ESO workshops and conferences supported by the ESF (European Science Foundation) through the GREAT (Gaia Research for European Astronomy Training) Research Network Programme. Based on data products from observations made with ESO Telescopes at the La Silla Paranal Observatory under programme ID 188.B-3002. This work was partly supported by the European Union FP7 programme through ERC grant number 320360 and by the Leverhulme Trust through grant RPG-2012-541. We acknowledge the support from INAF and Ministero dell’ Istruzione, dell’Università’ e della Ricerca (MIUR) in the form of the grant “Premiale VLT 2012”. GRR and SF acknowledge support by grant No. 2011-5042 from the Swedish Research Council. We acknowledge support from the Swedish National Space Board (Rymdstyrelsen). T.B. was funded by grant No. 621-2009-3911 from The Swedish Research Council.