A CHEMICAL TROMPE-L'CEIL: NO IRON SPREAD IN THE GLOBULAR CLUSTER M22

We present the analysis of high-resolution spectra obtained with UVES and UVES-FLAMES at the Very Large Telescope of 17 giants in the globular cluster (GC) M22, a stellar system suspected to have an intrinsic spread in iron abundance. We find that when surface gravities are derived spectroscopically (in order to obtain the same iron abundance from Fe I and Fe II lines) the [Fe/H] distribution spans similar to 0.5 dex, according to previous analyses. However, the gravities obtained in this way correspond to unrealistically low stellar masses (0.1-0.5 M-circle dot) for most of the surveyed giants. Instead, when photometric gravities are adopted, the [Fe II/H] distribution shows no evidence of spread, in variance with the [Fe I/H] distribution. This difference has been recently observed in other clusters and could be due to non-local thermodynamical equilibrium effects driven by over-ionization mechanisms that mainly affect the neutral species (thus providing lower [Fe I/H]), but leave [Fe II/H] unaltered. We confirm that the s-process elements show significant star-to-star variations and their abundances appear to be correlated with the difference between [Fe I/H] and [Fe II/H]. This puzzling finding suggests that the peculiar chemical composition of some cluster stars may be related to effects able to spuriously decrease [Fe I/H]. We conclude that M22 is a GC with no evidence of intrinsic iron spread, ruling out that it has retained the supernovae ejecta in its gravitational potential well.