Discovery of low-metallicity stars in the central parsec of the Milky Way

Understand

We present a metallicity analysis of 83 late-type giants within the central 1 pc of the Milky Way.

• K-band spectroscopy of these stars were obtained with the medium-spectral resolution integral-field spectrograph NIFS on Gemini North using laser-guide star adaptive optics.
• Using spectral template fitting with the MARCS synthetic spectral grid, we find that there is large variation in metallicity, with stars ranging from [M/H] $<$ -1.0 to above solar metallicity.
• About 6\% of the stars have [M/H] $<$ -0.5.