Abstract

The age, metallicity, and chemical abundances of stars are the primary tools that we use in Galactic archaeology. Through recent observational studies, it has been shown that only the metallicity and age of a star are needed to predict its detailed chemical abundance, as shown by a tight age-abundance relationship. In this work, we explore and establish this relationship for stars produced in a cosmological simulation of a Milky-Way like galaxy. Specifically, we want to understand the physical conditions that bring about the small intrinsic dispersion in the age-abundance relation, where these simulations reproduce observational trends, and where this breaks down. Using the Ananke Gaia mock catalog based on the Latte simulations, we find remarkably small intrinsic dispersions (< 0.02 dex) around the age-abundance relations, for the elements C, N, O, Mg, Si, Ca, and S. This dispersion increases towards the inner parts of the galaxy as well as at lower metallicities, where there are more contributions from older stars. All age-abundance relations also show similar trends to the Milky Way’s low-alpha disk, apart from Carbon and Calcium. This work has identified tensions between the observed and predicted trends in [X/Fe] as a function of age, which highlights how we should reconsider how we implement chemical enrichment in these simulated galaxies.