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Related Experiment Video

Updated: Oct 21, 2025

Metal-silicate Partitioning at High Pressure and Temperature: Experimental Methods and a Protocol to Suppress Highly Siderophile Element Inclusions

Metal-silicate Partitioning at High Pressure and Temperature: Experimental Methods and a Protocol to Suppress Highly Siderophile Element Inclusions

Published on: June 13, 2015

Large metallicity variations in the Galactic interstellar medium.

Annalisa De Cia¹, Edward B Jenkins², Andrew J Fox³

¹Department of Astronomy, University of Geneva, Versoix, Switzerland. annalisa.decia@unige.ch.

|September 9, 2021

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

The interstellar medium (ISM) shows significant metallicity variations, with dust-corrected measurements revealing lower abundances than previously assumed. This suggests accreting gas from high-velocity clouds doesn't mix well into the Galactic disk.

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Area of Science:

Astronomy and Astrophysics
Cosmochemistry

Background:

The interstellar medium (ISM) is composed of various gas and dust components.
Metallicity in the Galactic disk is often assumed to be uniform in chemical evolution models.
Dust depletion complicates accurate measurements of gaseous metallicity.

Purpose of the Study:

To determine the dust-corrected metallicity of the neutral ISM.
To investigate the extent of metallicity variations in the local ISM.
To understand the impact of accreting gas on ISM chemical homogeneity.

Main Methods:

Utilized ultraviolet absorption-line spectroscopy to measure ISM chemical abundances.
Applied dust-correction techniques to account for metals incorporated into solid grains.
Analyzed data from 25 stars in the Milky Way.

Main Results:

Reported significant metallicity variations in the neutral ISM, spanning a factor of ten.
Found an average metallicity of 55 ± 7% solar metallicity with a standard deviation of 0.28 dex.
Observed regions with metallicity as low as 17% solar metallicity, indicating significant inhomogeneity.

Conclusions:

The ISM exhibits substantial chemical inhomogeneities, challenging assumptions of a well-mixed, solar-metallicity gas disk.
Pristine gas accretion via high-velocity clouds is a likely cause of these observed metallicity variations.
Inefficient mixing of low-metallicity accreting gas may explain metallicity deviations in coeval stars.