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Register a new userStellar Metallicities from SkyMapper Photometry II: Precise photometric metallicities of $sim$280,000 giant stars with [Fe/H] $< -0.75$ in the Milky Way
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The Milky Ways metal-poor stars are nearby ancient objects that are used to study early chemical evolution and the assembly and structure of the Milky Way. Here we present reliable metallicities of $sim280,000$ stars with $-3.75 lesssim$ [Fe/H] $lesssim -0.75$ down to $g=17$ derived using metallicity-sensitive photometry from the second data release (DR2) of the SkyMapper Southern Survey. We use the dependency of the flux through the SkyMapper $v$ filter on the strength of the Ca II K absorption features, in tandem with SkyMapper $u,g,i$ photometry, to derive photometric metallicities for these stars. We find that metallicities derived in this way compare well to metallicities derived in large-scale spectroscopic surveys, and use such comparisons to calibrate and quantify systematics as a function of location, reddening, and color. We find good agreement with metallicities from the APOGEE, LAMOST, and GALAH surveys, based on a standard deviation of $sigmasim0.25$dex of the residuals of our photometric metallicities with respect to metallicities from those surveys. We also compare our derived photometric metallicities to metallicities presented in a number of high-resolution spectroscopic studies to validate the low metallicity end ([Fe/H] $< -2.5$) of our photometric metallicity determinations. In such comparisons, we find the metallicities of stars with photometric [Fe/H] $< -2.5$ in our catalog show no significant offset and a scatter of $sigmasim$0.31dex level relative to those in high-resolution work when considering the cooler stars ($g-i > 0.65$) in our sample. We also present an expanded catalog containing photometric metallicities of $sim720,000$ stars as a data table for further exploration of the metal-poor Milky Way.
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We present a study of the ultra-faint Milky Way dwarf satellite galaxy Tucana II using deep photometry from the 1.3m SkyMapper telescope at Siding Spring Observatory, Australia. The SkyMapper filter-set contains a metallicity-sensitive intermediate-band $v$ filter covering the prominent Ca II K feature at 3933.7A. When combined with photometry from the SkyMapper $u, g$, and $i$ filters, we demonstrate that $v$ band photometry can be used to obtain stellar metallicities with a precision of $sim0.20$dex when [Fe/H] $> -2.5$, and $sim0.34$dex when [Fe/H] $< -2.5$. Since the $u$ and $v$ filters bracket the Balmer Jump at 3646A, we also find that the filter-set can be used to derive surface gravities. We thus derive photometric metallicities and surface gravities for all stars down to a magnitude of $gsim20$ within $sim$75 arcminutes of Tucana II. Photometric metallicity and surface gravity cuts remove nearly all foreground contamination. By incorporating Gaia proper motions, we derive quantitative membership probabilities which recover all known members on the red giant branch of Tucana II. Additionally, we identify multiple likely new members in the center of the system and candidate members several half-light radii from the center of the system. Finally, we present a metallicity distribution function derived from the photometric metallicities of likely Tucana II members. This result demonstrates the utility of wide-field imaging with the SkyMapper filter-set in studying UFDs, and in general, low surface brightness populations of metal-poor stars. Upcoming work will clarify the membership status of several distant stars identified as candidate members of Tucana II.
In this work we present and discuss the observations of the Mn abundances for 247 FGK dwarfs, located in the Galactic disc with metallicity -1<Fe/H]<+0.3. The observed stars belong to the substructures of the Galaxy thick and thin discs, and to the Hercules stream. The observations were conducted using the 1.93 m telescope at Observatoire de Haute-Provence (OHP, France) equipped with the echelle type spectrographs ELODIE and SOPHIE. The abundances were derived under the LTE approximation, with an average error for the [Mn/Fe] ratio of 0.10 dex. For most of the stars in the sample Mn abundances are not available in the literature. We obtain an evolution of [Mn/Fe] ratio with the metallicity [Fe/H] consistent with previous data compilations. In particular, within the metallicity range covered by our stellar sample the [Mn/Fe] ratio is increasing with the increase of metallicity. This due to the contribution to the Galactic chemical evolution of Mn and Fe from thermonuclear supernovae. We confirm the baseline scenario where most of the Mn in the Galactic disc and in the Sun is made by thermonuclear supernovae. In particular, the effective contribution from core-collapse supernovae to the Mn in the Solar system is about 10-20%. However, present uncertainties affecting the production of Mn and Fe in thermonuclear supernovae are limiting the constraining power of the observed [Mn/Fe] trend in the Galactic discs on, e.g., the frequency of different thermonuclear supernovae populations. The different production of these two elements in different types of thermonuclear supernovae needs to be disentangled by the dependence of their relative production on the metallicity of the supernova progenitor.
We apply the spectroscopy-based stellar-color regression (SCR) method to perform an accurate photometric re-calibration of the second data release from the SkyMapper Southern Survey (SMSS DR2). From comparison with a sample of over 200,000 dwarf stars with stellar atmospheric parameters taken from GALAH+ DR3 and with accurate, homogeneous photometry from $Gaia$ DR2, zero-point offsets are detected in the original photometric catalog of SMSS DR2, in particular for the gravity- and metallicity-sensitive $uv$ bands. For $uv$ bands, the zero-point offsets are close to zero at very low extinction, and then steadily increase with $E (B - V)$, reaching as large as 0.174 and 0.134 mag respectively, at $E (B - V) sim 0.5$ mag. These offsets largely arise from the adopted dust term in the transformations used by SMSS DR2 to construct photometric calibrators from the ATLAS reference catalog. For the $gr$ bands, the zero-point offsets exhibit negligible variations with SFD $E(B - V )$, due to their tiny coefficients on the dust term in the transformation. Our study also reveals small, but significant, spatial variations of the zero-point offsets in all $uvgr$ bands. External checks using Stromgren photometry, WD loci and the SDSS Stripe 82 standard-star catalog independently confirm the zero-points found by our revised SCR method.
Dwarf galaxies are known to have remarkably low star formation efficiency due to strong feedback. Adopting the dwarf galaxies of the Milky Way as a laboratory, we explore a flexible semi-analytic galaxy formation model to understand how the feedback processes shape the satellite galaxies of the Milky Way. Using Markov-Chain Monte-Carlo, we exhaustively search a large parameter space of the model and rigorously show that the general wisdom of strong outflows as the primary feedback mechanism cannot simultaneously explain the stellar mass function and the mass--metallicity relation of the Milky Way satellites. An extended model that assumes that a fraction of baryons is prevented from collapsing into low-mass halos in the first place can be accurately constrained to simultaneously reproduce those observations. The inference suggests that two different physical mechanisms are needed to explain the two different data sets. In particular, moderate outflows with weak halo mass dependence are needed to explain the mass--metallicity relation, and prevention of baryons falling into shallow gravitational potentials of low-mass halos (e.g. pre-heating) is needed to explain the low stellar mass fraction for a given subhalo mass.
In the central few degrees of the bulge of the Milky Way there is a flattened structure of gas, dust and stars (the central molecular zone) similar to nuclear disks in other galaxies. Due to extreme foreground extinction we possess only sparse information about the (mostly old) stellar population of the nuclear disc. Here we present our KMOS spectroscopic survey of the stars in the nuclear disk reaching the old populations. In order to obtain an unbiased data set, we sample stars in the full extinction range along each line-of-sight. We also observe reference fields in neighboring regions of the Galactic bulge. Here we describe the design and execution of the survey and present first results. We obtain spectra and five spectral indices of 3113 stars with a median S/N of 67 and measure radial velocities for 3051 stars. Of those, 2735 sources have sufficient S/N to estimate temperatures and metallicities from indices. We derive metallicities using the CO 2-0 and Na I K-band spectral features, where we derive our own empirical calibration using metallicities obtained with higher resolution observations. We use 183 giant stars for calibration spanning in metallicity from -2.5 to 0.6 dex and covering temperatures of up to 5500 K. The derived index based metallicities deviate from the calibration values with a scatter of 0.32 dex. The internal uncertainty of our metallicities is likely smaller. We use these metallicity measurements together with the CO index to derive effective temperatures using literature relations. We publish the catalog here. Our data set complements Galactic surveys such as Gaia and APOGEE for the inner 200 pc radius of the Milky Way which is not readily accessible by those surveys due to extinction. We will use the derived properties in future papers for further analysis of the nuclear disk.
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