The origin of the lead-rich stars in Galactic halo: investigation of the model parameters for the s-process

Abstract

Several stars at the low-metallicity extreme of the Galactic halo show large spreads of [Pb/hs]. Theoretically, a s-process pattern should be obtained from an AGB star with fixed metallicity and initial mass. For the third dredge-up and the s-process model, several important properties depend primarily on the core mass of AGB stars. Zijlstra (2004) reported that the initial-final-mass relation steepens at low metallicity, due to low mass-loss efficiency. This perhaps affects the model parameters of the AGB stars, e.g. the overlap factor and the neutron irradiation time, in particular at low metallicity. The calculated results show indeed that the overlap factor and the neutron irradiation time are significantly small at low metallicities, especially for 3.0Msun AGB stars. The scatter of [Pb/hs] found in low metallicities can therefore be explained naturally when varying the initial mass of the low-mass AGB stars.