Exploring the Chemistry and Mass Function of the Globular Cluster 47 Tucanae with New Theoretical Color–Magnitude Diagrams

Abstract

Despite their shared origin, members of globular clusters display star-to-star variations in composition. The observed pattern of element abundances is unique to these stellar environments and cannot be fully explained by any proposed mechanism. It remains unclear whether stars form with chemical heterogeneity or inherit it from interactions with other members. These scenarios may be differentiated by the dependence of chemical spread on stellar mass; however, obtaining a sufficiently large mass baseline requires abundance measurements on the lower main sequence, which is too faint for spectroscopy even in the nearest globular clusters. We developed a stellar modeling method to obtain precise chemical abundances for stars near the end of the main sequence from multiband photometry, and we applied it to the globular cluster 47 Tucanae. The computational efficiency is attained by matching chemical elements to the model components that are most sensitive to their abundance. We determined [O/Fe] for ∼5000 members below the main-sequence knee at the level of accuracy, comparable to the spectroscopic measurements of evolved members in the literature. The inferred distribution disfavors stellar interactions as the origin of chemical spread; however, an accurate theory of accretion is required to draw a more definitive conclusion. We anticipate that future observations of 47 Tucanae with the James Webb Space Telescope will extend the mass baseline of our analysis into the substellar regime. Therefore, we present predicted color–magnitude diagrams and mass–magnitude relations for the brown dwarf members of 47 Tucanae.

Keywords

• Globular star clusters
• Stellar populations
• Chemical abundances
• Brown dwarfs
• HST photometry