Abstract

The Sagittarius dwarf spheroidal is a very complex galaxy, which has undergone prolonged star formation. From the very first high resolution chemical analysis of Sgr stars, conducted using spectra obtained during the commissioning of UVES at VLT, it was clear that the star had undergone a high level of chemical processing, at variance with most of the other Local Group dwarf spheroidals. Thanks to FLAMES at VLT we now have accurate metallicities and abundances of alpha-chain elements for about 150 stars, which provide the first reliable metallicity distribution for this galaxy. Besides the already known high metallicity tail the existence of a metal-poor population has also been highlighted, although an assessment of the fraction of Sgr stars which belong to this population requires a larger sample. From our data it is also obvious that Sagittarius is a nucleated galaxy and that the centre of the nucleus coincides with M54, as already shown by Monaco et al. © 2006 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.