Helium stratification in HD 145792: a new helium strong star

In this Letter, we report on the real nature of the star HD 145792, classified as He weak in 'The General Catalogue of Ap and Am stars'. By means of FEROS@ESO 1.52m high-resolution spectroscopic data, we refined the atmospheric parameters of the star, obtaining: Teff = 14400 ± 400 K, log g = 4.06 ± 0.08 and ξ = 0+0.6 km s-1. These values resulted always lower than those derived by different authors with pure photometric approaches. Using our values, we undertook an abundance analysis with the aim to derive, for the first time, the chemical pattern of the star's atmosphere. For metals, a pure local thermodynamic equilibrium synthesis (ATLAS9 and SYNTHE) has been used, while for helium a hybrid approach has been preferred (ATLAS9 and SYNSPEC). The principal result of our study is that HD 145792 belongs to He-strong class contrary to the previous classification. Moreover, helium seems to be vertically stratified in the atmosphere, decreasing towards deepest layers. For what that concerns metal abundances, we found the following: overabundance of oxygen, neon, silicon, phosphorus, sulphur and calcium; carbon, nitrogen, magnesium, aluminum, titanium, chromium and nickel are normal, being the discrepancies from the solar values within the experimental errors; iron resulted to be slightly underabundant. © 2008 The Author. Journal compilation