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Register a new userMapping the Galactic Halo I. The `Spaghetti Survey
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We describe a major survey of the Milky Way halo designed to test for kinematic substructure caused by destruction of accreted satellites. We use the Washington photometric system to identify halo stars efficiently for spectroscopic followup. Tracers include halo giants (detectable out to more than 100 kpc), blue horizontal branch stars, halo stars near the main sequence turnoff, and the ``blue metal-poor stars of Preston et al (1994). We demonstrate the success of our survey by showing spectra of stars we have identified in all these categories, including giants as distant as 75 kpc. We discuss the problem of identifying the most distant halo giants. In particular, extremely metal-poor halo K dwarfs are present in approximately equal numbers to the distant giants for V fainter than 18, and we show that our method will distinguish reliably between these two groups of metal-poor stars. We plan to survey 100 square degrees at high galactic latitude, and expect to increase the numbers of known halo giants, BHB stars and turnoff stars by more than an order of magnitude. In addition to the strong test that this large sample will provide for the question `was the Milky Way halo accreted from satellite galaxies?, we will improve the accuracy of mass measurements of the Milky Way beyond 50 kpc via the kinematics of the many distant giants and BHB stars we will find. We show that one of our first datasets constrains the halo density law over galactocentric radii of 5-20 kpc and z heights of 2-15 kpc. The data support a flattened power-law halo with b/a of 0.6 and exponent -3.0. More complex models with a varying axial ratio may be needed with a larger dataset.
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We present imaging results from a high Galactic latitude survey designed to examine the structure of the Galactic halo. The objective of the survey is to identify candidate halo stars which can be observed spectroscopically to obtain radial velocities and confirm halo membership. The Washington filter system is used for its ability to distinguish between dwarfs and giants, as well as provide a metallicity indicator. Our most successful imaging run used the BTC camera on the CTIO 4m telescope in April 1999. Photometric conditions during these observations provided superb photometry, with average errors for a star at $M=18.5$ of 0.009, 0.008, 0.011, and 0.009 for $C$, $M$, $DDO51$, and $T2$ respectively. These data are available with the electronic version of this paper, as well as through ADC (http://adc.gsfc.nasa.gov/). We use these data as a template to describe the details of our photometric reduction process. It is designed to perform CCD reductions and stellar photometry automatically during the observation run without the aid of external packages, such as IRAF and IDL. We describe necessary deviations from this procedure for other instruments used in the survey up to June 2000. Preliminary results from spectroscopic observations indicate a 97% efficiency in eliminating normal dwarfs from halo giant candidates for $M<18.5$. Unfortunately, low-metallicity subdwarfs cannot be photometrically distinguished from giants using the Washington filters. These major contaminates unavoidably reduced the overall giant identification efficiency to 66% for $M<18.5$. Our improved knowledge of these stars will increase this efficiency for future spectroscopic observations.
The Century Survey Galactic Halo Project is a photometric and spectroscopic survey from which we select relatively blue stars (V-R<0.30 mag) as probes of the Milky Way halo. The Survey strip spans the range of Galactic latitude 35<b<88 deg, allowing us to study the nature of populations of stars and their systematic motions as a function of Galactic latitude. One of our primary goals is to use blue horizontal-branch stars to trace potential star streams in the halo, and to test the hierarchical model for the formation of the Galaxy. In this paper we discuss spectroscopy and multi-passband photometry for a sample of 764 blue stars in the Century Survey region. Our sample consists predominantly of A- and F-type stars. We describe our techniques for determination of radial velocities, effective temperatures, metallicities, and surface gravities. Based on these measurements, we derive distance estimates by comparison with a set of calibrated isochrones. We devote special attention to the classification of blue horizontal-branch stars, and compare the results obtained from the application of the techniques of Kinman et al., Wilhelm et al., and Clewley et al. We identify 55 blue horizontal-branch stars. Our large sample of stars also uncovers a number of unusual objects, including three carbon-enhanced stars, a late B-type star located 0.8 kpc above the Galactic plane, and a DZ white dwarf.
We have measured the amount of kinematic substructure in the Galactic halo using the final data set from the Spaghetti project, a pencil-beam high latitude sky survey. Our sample contains 101 photometrically selected and spectroscopically confirmed giants with accurate distance, radial velocity and metallicity information. We have developed a new clustering estimator: the 4distance measure, which when applied to our data set leads to the identification of 1 group and 7 pairs of clumped stars. The group, with 6 members, can confidently be matched to tidal debris of the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy. Two pairs match the properties of known Virgo structures. Using models of the disruption of Sagittarius in Galactic potentials with different degrees of dark halo flattening, we show that this favors a spherical or prolate halo shape, as demonstrated by Newberg et al. (2007) using SDSS data. One additional pair can be linked to older Sagittarius debris. We find that 20% of the stars in the Spaghetti data set are in substructures. From comparison with random data sets we derive a very conservative lower limit of 10% to the amount of substructure in the halo. However, comparison to numerical simulations shows that our results are also consistent with a halo entirely built up from disrupted satellites, provided the dominating features are relatively broad due to early merging or relatively heavy progenitor satellites.
We use 666 blue horizontal branch (BHB) stars from the 2Qz redshift survey to map the Galactic halo in four dimensions (position, distance and velocity). We find that the halo extends to at least 100 kpc in Galactocentric distance, and obeys a single power-law density profile of index ~-2.5 in two different directions separated by 150 degrees on the sky. This suggests that the halo is spherical. Our map shows no large kinematically coherent structures (streams, clouds or plumes) and appears homogeneous. However, we find that at least 20% of the stars in the halo reside in substructures and that these substructures are dynamically young. The velocity dispersion profile of the halo appears to increase towards large radii while the stellar velocity distribution is non Gaussian beyond 60 kpc. We argue that the outer halo consists of a multitude of low luminosity overlapping tidal streams from recently accreted objects.
Modern theories of galaxy formation predict that the Galactic stellar halo was hierarchically assembled from the accretion and disruption of smaller systems. This hierarchical assembly is expected to produce a high degree of structure in the combined phase and chemistry space; this structure should provide a relatively direct probe of the accretion history of our Galaxy. Revealing this structure requires precise 3D positions (including distances), 3D velocities, and chemistry for large samples of stars. The Gaia satellite is delivering proper motions and parallaxes for >1 billion stars to G~20. However, radial velocities and metallicities will only be available to G~15, which is insufficient to probe the outer stellar halo (>10 kpc). Moreover, parallaxes will not be precise enough to deliver high-quality distances for stars beyond ~10 kpc. Identifying accreted systems throughout the stellar halo therefore requires a large ground-based spectroscopic survey to complement Gaia. Here we provide an overview of the H3 Stellar Spectroscopic Survey, which will deliver precise stellar parameters and spectrophotometric distances for 200,000 stars to r=18. Spectra are obtained with the Hectochelle instrument at the MMT, which is configured for the H3 Survey to deliver resolution R~23,000 spectra covering the wavelength range 5150A-5300A. The survey is optimized for stellar halo science and therefore focuses on high Galactic latitude fields (|b|>30 deg.), sparsely sampling 15,000 sq. degrees. Targets are selected on the basis of Gaia parallaxes, enabling very efficient selection of bone fide halo stars. The survey began in the Fall of 2017 and has collected 88,000 spectra to-date. All of the data, including the derived stellar parameters, will eventually be made publicly available via the survey website: h3survey.rc.fas.harvard.edu.
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