2014ApJ...788..149M

We present a new determination of the solar fluorine abundance together with abundance measurements of fluorine in two Galactic open clusters. We analyzed a sunspot spectrum, observed by L. Wallace and W. Livingston with the Fourier Transform Spectrometer at the McMath/Pierce Solar Telescope situated on Kitt Peak, and spectra of four giants in the old cluster M67 (∼4.5 Gyr) and three giants in the young cluster NGC 6404 (∼0.5 Gyr), obtained with the CRIRES spectrograph at the Very Large Telescope. Fluorine was measured through the synthesis of the available HF lines. We adopted the recent set of experimental molecular parameters of HF delivered by the HITRAN database, and found a new solar fluorine abundance of A(F) = 4.40±0.25, in good agreement with the M67 average fluorine abundance of A(F) = 4.49±0.20. The new solar abundance is in a very good agreement with the meteoritic value. The modern spectrosynthesis tools used and the agreement with the meteoritic value and with the results in open cluster M67, known to be a solar analogue, make our solar determination very robust. At the same time, the fluorine measurement in the above-mentioned open clusters is the first step toward understanding its evolution during the last ∼10 Gyr in the Galactic disk. In order to develop this project, a larger sample of open clusters is required, in order to allow us to trace the evolution of fluorine as a function of time and, in turn, to better understand its origin.