Stellar metallicities beyond the Local Group: the potential of J-band spectroscopy with extremely large telescopes

We present simulated J-band spectroscopy of red giants and supergiants with a 42 m European Extremely Large Telescope (E-ELT), using tools developed toward the EAGLE Phase A instrument study. The simulated spectra are used to demonstrate the validity of the 1.15–1.22 μm region to recover accurate stellar metallicities from Solar and metal-poor (one tenth Solar) spectral templates. From tests at spectral resolving powers of four and ten thousand, we require continuum signal-to-noise ratios in excess of 50 (per two-pixel resolution element) to recover the input metallicity to within 0.1 dex. We highlight the potential of direct estimates of stellar metallicites (over the range − 1