An Empirical View to the Early Chemical Evolution of Bulge/Disk Galaxies

Abstract

Scaling from the empirical metal yield as measured in clusters of galaxies, it is inferred that early in the evolution of the Galaxy the bulge stellar population has produced $\sim 10^9\msun$ of metals, at least 5 times more than the total metal content of the bulge today. It is argued that an early galactic wind from the starbursting bulge has pre-enriched a vast region around it, with these metals being able to enrich to $\sim 1/10$ solar of order of $5\times 10^{11}\msun$ of pristine material. From the empirical evidence that bulges come before disks, it is inferred that the Milky Way disk formed out of this pre-enriched material, which accounts for the scarcity of metal poor stars in the solar neighborhood, the so-called `G-Dwarf Problem'. High redshift observations are now becoming able to efficiently explore the $1.2\lsim z\lsim 3$ region of the universe, when disk formation and morphological differentiation may have taken place.