New Insights into the Early Stage of the Galactic Chemical Evolution

Abstract

The supernova yields of several heavy elements including alpha-, iron-group, and r-process elements are obtained as a function of the mass of their progenitor main-sequence stars M_ms from the abundance patterns of extremely metal-poor stars with a procedure recently proposed by Shigeyama and Tsujimoto (1998). The ejected masses of alpha- and iron-group elements increase with M_ms, whereas more Eu is ejected from supernovae with lower M_ms. For these several heavy elements, it is shown that the average abundance ratios weighted by the Salpeter initial mass function coincide with the ratios observed in stars with -2<[Fe/H]<-1 within 0.1 dex. It follows that the correlations of stellar abundance ratios with the metallicity are twofold. One is the abundance ratios for [Fe/H] <-2.5 imprinted by the nucleosynthesis in individual supernovae on the timescale 10^7yr and the other for [Fe/H]>-2 results from the mixing of the products from a whole site of the nucleosynthesis, taking place on the timescale longer than 10^9yr.