Carbon and oxygen in metal-poor halo stars

Carbon and oxygen are key tracers of the Galactic chemical evolution; in particular, a reported upturn in [C/O] towards decreasing [O/H] in metal-poor halo stars could be a signature of nucleosynthesis by massive Population III stars. We reanalyse carbon, oxygen, and iron abundances in 39 metal-poor turn-off stars. For the first time, we take into account 3D hydrodynamic effects together with departures from local thermodynamic equilibrium (LTE) when determining both the stellar parameters and the elemental abundances, by deriving effective temperatures from 3D non-LTE Hβ profiles, surface gravities from Gaia parallaxes, iron abundances from 3D LTE Fe II equivalent widths, and carbon and oxygen abundances from 3D non-LTE C I and O I equivalent widths. We find that [C/Fe] stays flat with [Fe/H], whereas [O/Fe] increases linearly up to 0.75 dex with decreasing [Fe/H] down to −3.0 dex. Therefore [C/O] monotonically decreases towards decreasing [C/H], in contrast to previous findings, mainly because the non-LTE effects for O I at low [Fe/H] are weaker with our improved calculations.AMA and KL acknowledge funds from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in the framework of the Sofja Kovalevskaja Award endowed by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, and KL also acknowledges funds from the Swedish Research Council (grant 2015-004153) and Marie Skłodowska Curie Actions (cofund project INCA 600398). Funding for the Stellar Astrophysics Centre is provided by The Danish National Research Foundation (grant DNRF106). MA gratefully acknowledges funding from the Australian Research Council (grants FL110100012 and DP150100250). Parts of this research were conducted by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for All Sky Astrophysics in 3 Dimensions (ASTRO 3D), through project number CE170100013. PSB acknowledges financial support from the Swedish Research Council and the project grant “The New Milky Way” from the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation. This work was based on observations collected at the European Southern Observatory under ESO programmes 67.D-0106 and 73.D-0024