Deuterium astration in the local disc and beyond
Romano, Donatella ; Tosi, Monica ; Chiappini, Cristina ; Matteucci, Francesca
In: Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 2006, vol. 369, no. 1, p. 295-304
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- Estimates of the interstellar deuterium abundance span a wide range of values. Until recently, it was customary to adopt the abundance of deuterium measured in the Local Bubble as representative of the local one. Now, it is becoming unclear whether the true local deuterium abundance is significantly higher or lower than this value, depending on the interpretation given to current data. It is important to deal with the issue of the deuterium variation and see whether it challenges our current understanding of the Galaxy evolution. To this aim, we study the evolution of deuterium in the framework of successful models for the chemical evolution of the Milky Way able to reproduce the majority of the observational constraints for the solar neighbourhood and for the Galactic disc. We show that, in the framework of our models, the lowest D/H (deuterium-to-oxygen) values observed locally cannot be explained in terms of simple astration processes occurring during the Galaxy evolution. Indeed, the combination of a mild star formation and a continuous infall of unprocessed gas required to fit all the available observational data allows only a modest variation of the deuterium abundance from its primordial value. Therefore, we suggest that depletion of deuterium on to dust grains is the most likely physical mechanism proposed so far to explain the observed dispersion in the local data