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Abstract Chemical tagging is a central pursuit of galactic archaeology, but requires sufficiently discriminative abundances to uniquely identify sites of star formation. This task is complicated by intrinsic scatter among conatal stars, interelement correlations, imprecise abundance measurements, and systematics across stellar evolutionary states. In this work, we formalize the abundance correlation structure of the Milky Way disk by quantifying the information available in individual element abundances once a subset is known, and map interelement residual correlations to uncover hidden signatures of nucleosynthesis. We use two data sets of 79 (593) stars across −0.15 2% precision for ∼30 elements. However, the residual structure encodes fingerprints of star formation history, inherited from nucleosynthesis and environmental variations, and provides critical constraints for chemical evolution models. Future disk surveys must achieve sub-2%–5% precision in 30+ elements to access this independent information.
Mead et al. (Thu,) studied this question.