Spectroscopy of RGB stars in {omega} Centauri

We collect medium-resolution (R~2000) spectra using the Blanco 4 m telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory equipped with Hydra, the fiber-fed multi-object spectrograph. We demonstrate that blending of stellar light in optical fibers severely limits the accuracy of spectroscopic parameters in the crowded central region of the cluster.

When photometric temperatures are taken in the spectroscopic analysis, our kinematically selected cluster members, excluding those that are strongly affected by flux from neighboring stars, include relatively fewer stars at intermediate metallicity ([Fe/H]~-1.5) than seen in the previous high-resolution survey for brighter giants in Johnson & Pilachowski (2010, J/ApJ/722/1373). As opposed to the trend of increasing [Ca/Fe] with [Fe/H] found by those authors, our [Ca/Fe] estimates, based on Ca II H & K measurements, show essentially the same mean [Ca/Fe] for most of the metal-poor and metal-intermediate populations in this cluster, suggesting that mass- or metallicity-dependent SN II yields may not be necessary in their proposed chemical evolution scenario.