Published in

Oxford University Press (OUP), Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 1(503), p. 694-703, 2021

DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stab568

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Mass-loss law for red giant stars in simple population globular clusters

This paper was not found in any repository, but could be made available legally by the author.
This paper was not found in any repository, but could be made available legally by the author.

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Data provided by SHERPA/RoMEO

Abstract

ABSTRACT The amount of mass lost by stars during the red-giant branch (RGB) phase is one of the main parameters to understand and correctly model the late stages of stellar evolution. Nevertheless, a fully comprehensive knowledge of the RGB mass-loss is still missing. Galactic Globular Clusters (GCs) are ideal targets to derive empirical formulations of mass-loss, but the presence of multiple populations with different chemical compositions has been a major challenge to constrain stellar masses and RGB mass-losses. Recent work has disentangled the distinct stellar populations along the RGB and the horizontal branch (HB) of 46 GCs, thus providing the possibility to estimate the RGB mass-loss of each stellar population. The mass-losses inferred for the stellar populations with pristine chemical composition (called first-generation or 1G stars) tightly correlate with cluster metallicity. This finding allows us to derive an empirical RGB mass-loss law for 1G stars. In this paper, we investigate seven GCs with no evidence of multiple populations and derive the RGB mass-loss by means of high-precision Hubble-Space Telescope photometry and accurate synthetic photometry. We find a cluster-to-cluster variation in the mass-loss ranging from ∼0.1 to ∼0.3 M⊙. The RGB mass-loss of simple-population GCs correlates with the metallicity of the host cluster. The discovery that simple-population GCs and 1G stars of multiple population GCs follow similar mass-loss versus metallicity relations suggests that the resulting mass-loss law is a standard outcome of stellar evolution.