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Register a new userSEGUE-2 and APOGEE: Revealing the History of the Milky Way
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Constance Rockosi
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The history of the Milky Way is encoded in the spatial distributions, kinematics, and chemical enrichment patterns of its resolved stellar populations. SEGUE-2 and APOGEE, two of the four surveys that comprise SDSS-III (the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III), will map these distributions and enrichment patterns at optical and infrared wavelengths, respectively. Using the existing SDSS spectrographs, SEGUE-2 will obtain spectra of 140,000 stars in selected high-latitude fields to a magnitude limit r ~ 19.5, more than doubling the sample of distant halo stars observed in the SDSS-II survey SEGUE (the Sloan Extension for Galactic Understanding and Exploration). With spectral resolution R ~ 2000 and typical S/N per pixel of 20-25, SEGUE and SEGUE-2 measure radial velocities with typical precision of 5-10 km/s and metallicities ([Fe/H]) with a typical external error of 0.25 dex. APOGEE (the Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment) will use a new, 300-fiber H-band spectrograph (1.5-1.7 micron) to obtain high-resolution (R ~ 24,000), high signal-to-noise ratio (S/N ~ 100 per pixel) spectra of 100,000 red giant stars to a magnitude limit H ~ 12.5. Infrared spectroscopy penetrates the dust that obscures the inner Galaxy from our view, allowing APOGEE to carry out the first large, homogeneous spectroscopic survey of all Galactic stellar populations. APOGEE spectra will allow radial velocity measurements with < 0.5 km/s precision and abundance determinations (with ~ 0.1 dex precision) of 15 chemical elements for each program star, which can be used to reconstruct the history of star formation that produced these elements. (abridged)
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Although originally conceived as primarily an extragalactic survey, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-I), and its extensions SDSS-II and SDSS-III, continue to have a major impact on our understanding of the formation and evolution of our host galaxy, the Milky Way. The sub-survey SEGUE: Sloan Extension for Galactic Exploration and Understanding, executed as part of SDSS-II, obtained some 3500 square degrees of additional ugriz imaging, mostly at lower Galactic latitudes, in order to better sample the disk systems of the Galaxy. Most importantly, it obtained over 240,000 medium-resolution spectra for stars selected to sample Galactocentric distances from 0.5 to 100 kpc. In combination with stellar targets from SDSS-I, and the recently completed SEGUE-2 program, executed as part of SDSS-III, the total sample of SDSS spectroscopy for Galactic stars comprises some 500,000 objects. The development of the SEGUE Stellar Parameter Pipeline has enabled the determination of accurate atmospheric parameter estimates for a large fraction of these stars. Many of the stars in this data set within 5 kpc of the Sun have sufficiently well-measured proper motions to determine their full space motions, permitting examination of the nature of much more distant populations represented by members that are presently passing through the solar neighborhood. Ongoing analyses of these data are being used to draw a much clearer picture of the nature of our galaxy, and to supply targets for detailed high-resolution spectroscopic follow-up with the worlds largest telescopes. Here we discuss a few highlights of recently completed and ongoing investigations with these data.
We present an examination of the metallicity distribution function of the outermost stellar halo of the Galaxy based on an analysis of both local (within 4 kpc of the Sun, ~16,500 stars) and non-local (~21,700 stars) samples. These samples were compiled using spectroscopic metallicities from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and photometric metallicities from the SkyMapper Southern Survey. We detect a negative metallicity gradient in the outermost halo (r > 35 kpc from the Galactic center), and find that the frequency of very metal-poor ([Fe/H] < -2.0) stars in the outer-halo region reaches up to ~60% in our most distant sample, commensurate with previous theoretical predictions. This result provides clear evidence that the outer-halo formed hierarchically. The retrograde stars in the outermost halo exhibit a roughly constant metallicity, which may be linked to the accretion of the Sequoia progenitor. In contrast, prograde stars in the outermost halo exhibit a strong metallicity-distance dependence, indicating that they likely originated from the accretion of galaxies less massive than the Sequoia progenitor galaxy.
Gaia DR2 provides unprecedented precision in measurements of the distance and kinematics of stars in the solar neighborhood. Through applying unsupervised machine learning on DR2s 5-dimensional dataset (3d position + 2d velocity), we identify a number of clusters, associations, and co-moving groups within 1 kpc and $|b|<30^circ$ (many of which have not been previously known). We estimate their ages with the precision of $sim$0.15 dex. Many of these groups appear to be filamentary or string-like, oriented in parallel to the Galactic plane, and some span hundreds of pc in length. Most of these string lack a central cluster, indicating that their filamentary structure is primordial, rather than the result of tidal stripping or dynamical processing. The youngest strings ($<$100 Myr) are orthogonal to the Local Arm. The older ones appear to be remnants of several other arm-like structures that cannot be presently traced by dust and gas. The velocity dispersion measured from the ensemble of groups and strings increase with age, suggesting a timescale for dynamical heating of $sim$300 Myr. This timescale is also consistent with the age at which the population of strings begins to decline, while the population in more compact groups continues to increase, suggesting that dynamical processes are disrupting the weakly bound string populations, leaving only individual clusters to be identified at the oldest ages. These data shed a new light on the local galactic structure and a large scale cloud collapse.
We investigate the properties of the double sequences of the Milky Way discs visible in the [$alpha$/Fe] vs [Fe/H] diagram. In the framework of Galactic formation and evolution, we discuss the complex relationships between age, metallicity, [$alpha$/Fe], and the velocity components. We study stars with measured chemical, seismic and astrometric properties from the APOGEE survey, the Kepler and Gaia satellites, respectively. We separate the [$alpha$/Fe]-[Fe/H] diagram into 3 stellar populations: the thin disc, the high-$alpha$ metal-poor thick disc and the high-$alpha$ metal-rich thick disc and characterise each of these in the age-chemo-kinematics parameter space. We compare results obtained from different APOGEE data releases and using two recent age determinations. We use the Besanc{c}on Galaxy model (BGM) to highlight selection biases and mechanisms not included in the model. The thin disc exhibits a flat age-metallicity relation while [$alpha$/Fe] increases with stellar age. We confirm no correlation between radial and vertical velocities with [Fe/H], [$alpha$/Fe] and age for each stellar population. Considering both samples, V$_varphi$ decreases with age for the thin disc, while it increases with age for the h$alpha$mp thick disc. Although the age distribution of the h$alpha$mr thick disc is very close to that of the h$alpha$mp thick disc between 7 and 14 Gyr, its kinematics seems to follow that of the thin disc. This feature, not predicted by the hypotheses included in the BGM, suggests a different origin and history for this population. Finally, we show that there is a maximum dispersion of the vertical velocity, $sigma_Z$, with age for the h$alpha$mp thick disc around 8 Gyr. The comparisons with the BGM simulations suggest a more complex chemo-dynamical scheme to explain this feature, most likely including mergers and radial migration effects
The all-sky Milky Way Star Clusters (MWSC) survey provides uniform and precise ages and other parameters for a variety of clusters in the Solar Neighbourhood. We construct the cluster age distribution, investigate its spatial variations, and discuss constraints on cluster formation scenarios of the Galactic disk during the last 5 Gyrs. Due to the spatial extent of the MWSC, we consider spatial variations of the age distribution along galactocentric radius $R_G$, and along $Z$-axis. For the analysis of the age distribution we use 2242 clusters, which all lie within roughly 2.5 kpc of the Sun. To connect the observed age distribution to the cluster formation history we build an analytical model based on simple assumptions on the cluster initial mass function and on the cluster mass-lifetime relation, fit it to the observations, and determine the parameters of the cluster formation law. Comparison with the literature shows that earlier results strongly underestimated the number of evolved clusters with ages $tgtrsim 100$ Myr. Recent studies based on all-sky catalogues agree better with our data, but still lack the oldest clusters with ages $tgtrsim 1$ Gyr. We do not observe a strong variation in the age distribution along $R_G$, though we find an enhanced fraction of older clusters ($t>1$ Gyr) in the inner disk. In contrast, the distribution strongly varies along $Z$. The high altitude distribution practically does not contain clusters with $t<1$ Gyr. With simple assumptions on the cluster formation history, cluster initial mass function and cluster lifetime we can reproduce the observations. Cluster formation rate and cluster lifetime are strongly degenerate, which does not allow us to disentangle different formation scenarios. In all cases the cluster formation rate is strongly declining with time, and the cluster initial mass function is very shallow at the high mass end. (abridged)
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