Speaker
Description
Stars in an open cluster are assumed to have formed from a broadly homogeneous distribution of gas, implying that they should be chemically homogeneous. We test this assumption by quantifying chemical scatter in Milky Way open clusters in a broad set of abundances, in order to probe a variety of nucleosynthetic pathways to learn about ISM pollution and gas-mixing in molecular clouds. We use APOGEE and Gaia kinematics to determine cluster membership. We constrain chemical scatter in a sample of giant stars in 16 open clusters, and show that many of the clusters are chemically inhomogeneous. We also explore the primary drivers of variation between the scatters of different elements and study the relationships between chemical inhomogeneity and other cluster properties.
