Chemical abundances as fossil records of dwarf galaxy evolution

Abstract: Dwarf galaxies are excellent laboratories for studying galaxy evolution. They are typically old and metal-poor systems, with overall simpler evolutionary histories than the Milky Way. Dwarf galaxies also played a central role in the evolution of the Milky Way, as there is evidence that several of them were accreted by our Galaxy over time. A powerful way to uncover the evolutionary history of dwarf galaxies is through their chemical abundance distributions. Different chemical elements are produced by distinct nucleosynthetic channels and provide insights into the key physical processes that shaped dwarf galaxies, both those currently orbiting the Milky Way and those that were accreted onto it. In this talk, I will present results on the evolutionary histories of dwarf galaxies, based on chemical abundances derived from high-resolution stellar spectra of one of the main building blocks of the Milky Way, Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus, as well as on chemical evolution models of several dwarf galaxies.