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Chemical tagging is a promising technique in galactic archaeology to trace the evolutionary history of the Milky Way using elemental abundances of stars along with galactic chemical evolution models to infer their birth location. However, the precision with which elemental abundances need to be measured and the precision that one can ascribe to formation locations is uncertain. Here, I’ll discuss my work on measuring the scale of elemental abundance homogeneity in cosmological zoom-in simulations of Milky Way-mass galaxies. I will show that 1-D galactic chemical evolution models are insufficient to capture the important azimuthal abundance structure that dominates galaxies at z > ~0.8. I will also show that 2-D abundance patterns introduce more uncertainty in stellar birth sites than typical measurement uncertainties. This raises the important question, how can we improve chemical evolution models to keep pace with higher resolution observations? |
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