Kate Womack (University of Hull)

The chemical evolution of fluorine in the Milky Way poses a challenge as it’s only stable isotope, 19F can potentially be made in a range of stellar environments. The main postulated sites for fluorine production are: AGB stars, Wolf-Rayet stars, the ν-process in core-collapse supernovae, novae and rotating massive stars. In recent years, each source has been investigated in chemical evolution studies as being the primary source of fluorine production. Rotating massive stars have become a promising candidate for being one of the main sources of fluorine production, due to extra mixing in these objects creating more 14N as seed nuclei for 19F production. Therefore, more recent studies have included rotating massive stars in their models. It has been shown that yields of AGB stars in combination with yields of rotating massive stars can start to reproduce recent observations of fluorine in giant stars. We use the galactic chemical evolution code OMEGA+ to create a Milky Way model that can reproduce the recent set of fluorine abundances, including the ‘plateau’ at [Fe/H] ∼ 0.5 dex.