Overview

The concept of relic kinematic assemblages from dispersed stellar clusters has remained contentious since Eggen's initial formulation of moving groups in the 1960's. However, the availability of high quality parallaxes from the Hipparcos space astrometry mission has resulted in distance measurements for thousands of nearby, seemingly isolated stars. With these newly determined distances, a high resolution spectroscopic abundance analysis can be brought to bear on many of the alleged members of these relic associations. If a structure is a relic of an open cluster, the members can be expected to be monolithic in age and abundance inasmuch as homogeneity is observed in young open clusters. In this dissertation I have examined 34 members of the Wolf 630 moving group using high resolution stellar spectroscopy. The stars of the sample have been analyzed through a process known as chemical tagging to determine abundance homogeneity and confirm the existence of a homogeneous subsample of 20 stars. Fitting the homogeneous subsample with Yale-Yonsei isochrones, yields a single evolutionary sequence of ∼2.7 +/- 0.5 Gyr. Additionally basic N-Body simulations, using the NEMO Stellar Dynamics toolkit, have been used to examine the kinematic evolution of typical star clusters in a model galactic disk potential that has been studded with Giant Molecular clouds. The results of these simulations suggests a high degree of kinematic coherence following spatial dissolution, validating that open clusters can maintain a common kinematic identity following their loss of spatial concordance. It is, therefore, concluded that moving groups can plausibly represent the relics of dissolved open clusters and that a 20 star subsample of the Wolf 630 moving group sample of 34 stars could represent such a dispersed cluster with an =-0.01 +/- 0.02 and an age of 2.7 +/- 0.5 Gyr.

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