Milky Way Mapper decoded abundances – II: From patterns to paths
Clicks: 1
ID: 314860
2026
Article Quality & Performance Metrics
Overall Quality
Not rated
Combines reader engagement with the AI quality analysis. This
article has not been analysed, so there is no overall score —
reader engagement is measured and shown alongside.
Reader Engagement
0.0
/100
1 views
0 readers
AI Quality Assessment
Not analyzed
Readership in this journal
Ranked #785 of 908 articles by views in monthly notices of the royal astronomical society
Most read
Least read
Bar heights use a square-root scale. Only the 120 most-read articles are drawn; the journal has 908 in total.
Mint this article as an NFT
Not yet mintedCreate a permanent, verifiable on-chain record of this article on the Scimatic Network. The NFT is held in your Journament account, and you can withdraw it to your own wallet at any time.
5
SUSD
one-off · no wallet required
Abstract
Abstract The element abundances of Milky Way disc stars encode entangled imprints of multiple enrichment processes, making it difficult to uncover the underlying chemical evolution. Here we re-project 16 stellar abundances for ≈199, 290 red giant stars ([Fe/H]>−1) into a set of (4) shared enrichment patterns, providing a generative framework for learning the organising structure of the Milky Way disc. The relative contributions of these patterns vary systematically across the disc, revealing a low-dimensional enrichment basis that responds coherently to global drivers of disc evolution. By grouping stars according to their pattern contributions, we identify coherent enrichment pathways that exhibit strong chemo-spatial correlations and are stratified in both age and height above the plane, linking radial growth to vertical disc structure. Stars occupying similar positions along these enrichment pathways also show coherent vertical deviations across radius, indicating that the low-dimensional chemical structure captures the disc’s response to dynamical perturbations. We identify a transition in enrichment behaviour at approximately 6 Gyr, marking the onset of a more chemically mixed regime with increasing contributions from delayed sources. Within this connected system, the observed α-bimodality arises within a shared, low-dimensional abundance structure, with stars populating continuous sequences of changing enrichment fractions that are tightly coupled to spatial, temporal, and orbital coordinates across the Milky Way disc.
| Reference Key |
openalex_W7162321170
Use this key to autocite in the manuscript while using
SciMatic Manuscript Manager or Thesis Manager
|
|---|---|
| Authors | Melissa Ness, Sarah Aquilina, Jennifer Mead, Emily Griffith, Catherine Manea, Jonathan Bird, Andrew R Casey, Lucy Lu, Kathryn V. Johnston, Michael R. Blanton, James W. Johnson, Maja Jablonska, Leticia Carigi, José G Fernández-Trincado, Ricardo López Valdivia, Ying-Yi Song, Juna Kollmeier |
| Journal | monthly notices of the royal astronomical society |
| Year | 2026 |
| DOI |
10.1093/mnras/stag960
|
| URL | |
| Keywords | Keywords not found |
Citations
No citations found. To add a citation, contact the admin at info@scimatic.org
Comments
No comments yet. Be the first to comment on this article.