Speaker
Description
The 5 million stars that the SDSS-V Milky Way Mapper program is designed to study, will be probed for signatures of mostly light elements, up to the iron-peak, to understand the enrichment history of the Milky Way (MW). However, our understanding of the MW’s chemical enrichment will remain incomplete without the study of heavier elements, formed via neutron-capture processes. In this talk, I will show how the combined power of optical and UV spectroscopy can be used to obtain chemical abundances from the lightest (Li; Z = 3) to the heaviest (U; Z = 92) elements, enabling constraints on a variety of enrichment sources, including the rapid-neutron capture process. In addition to constraining the yields of the enrichment events, I will show how the abundances of some of the heaviest elements (e.g., U and Th) can be improved and then used to constrain the timestamp of these enrichment events using radioactive-decay dating and independent of stellar evolution models. Finally, I will discuss how such investigations of a broader range of elements can be achieved within the MWM program and by building upon it to piece together a comprehensive picture of the Galactic chemical enrichment.
