Abundance Ratios in the Galactic Bulge and Super Metal-Rich Type II Nucleosynthesis: Pitfalls of the Analysis

We present abundance results from our Keck/HIRES observations of giants in the Galactic Bulge. We confirm that the metallicity distribution of giants in the low-reddening bulge field Baade’s Window can be well-fit by a closed-box enrichment model. We also confirm previous observations that find enhanced [Mg/Fe], [Si/Fe] and [Ca/Fe] for all bulge giants, including those at super-solar metallicities. However, we find that the [O/Fe] ratios of metal-rich bulge dwarfs decrease with increasing metallicity, contrary to what is expected if the enhancements of the other α-elements is due to Type II supernovae enrichment. We suggest that the decrease in oxygen production may be due to mass loss in the pre-supernova evolution of metal-rich progenitors.