AAS 195th Meeting, January 2000
Session 62. Sgr A* and Milky Way
Oral, Thursday, January 13, 2000, 2:00-3:30pm, Regency VII

## [62.05] Stellar Iron Abundances at the Galactic Center

S. V. Ramirez, K. Sellgren (OSU), J. S. Carr (NRL), S. Balachandran (U.Maryland), R. D. Blum (CTIO), D. M. Terndrup, A. Steed (OSU)

Measurements of [Fe/H] for ten M supergiant and giant stars within 30 pc of the Galactic Center (GC) are presented. The results are based on high-resolution (\lambda / \Delta \lambda = 40,000) K-band spectra, taken with CSHELL at the NASA Infrared Telescope Facility. The iron abundance is determined by detailed abundance analysis, performed with the spectral synthesis program MOOG. The mean [Fe/H] of the GC stars is determined to be near solar, [Fe/H] = +0.09 ± 0.09. Our analysis is a differential analysis, as we have observed and applied the same analysis technique to eleven nearby stars with similar temperatures and luminosities as the GC stars. The mean [Fe/H] of the nearby comparison stars, [Fe/H] = +0.03 ± 0.05, is similar to that of the GC stars. The GC width of the [Fe/H] distribution is found to be narrower than the width of the [Fe/H] distribution of Baade's Window in the bulge and consistent with the width of the [Fe/H] distribution of supergiant stars in the solar neighborhood.

This work has been supported by NSF grant AST-9619230 and NSF grant # GF-1003-97 from AURA under NSF cooperative agreement AST-8947990 and from Fundación Andes under project C-12984.