Stellar astrophysics in the near UV with VLT-CUBES
  Alongside future observations with the new European Extremely Large Telescope
(ELT), optimised instruments on the 8-10m generation of telescopes will still
be competitive at 'ground UV' wavelengths (3000-4000 A). The near UV provides a
wealth of unique information on the nucleosynthesis of iron-peak elements,
molecules, and neutron-capture elements. In the context of development of the
near-UV CUBES spectrograph for ESO's Very Large Telescope (VLT), we are
investigating the impact of spectral resolution on the ability to estimate
chemical abundances for beryllium and more than 30 iron-peak and heavy
elements. From work ahead of the Phase A conceptual design of CUBES, here we
present a comparison of the elements observable at the notional resolving power
of CUBES (R~20,000) to those with VLT-UVES (R~40,000). For most of the
considered lines signal-to-noise is a more critical factor than resolution. We
summarise the elements accessible with CUBES, several of which (e.g. Be, Ge,
Hf) are now the focus of quantitative simulations as part of the ongoing Phase
A study.
