The Galactic Archaeology with HERMES (GALAH) Survey is a massive observational project to trace the Milky Way's history of star formation, chem-
The overlap between the spectroscopic Galactic Archaeology with HERMES (GALAH) survey and Gaia provides a high-dimensional chemodynamical space of unprecedented size. We present a first analysis of a subset of this overlap, of 7066 dwarf, turn-off, and subgiant stars. These stars have spectra from the GALAH survey and high parallax precision from the Gaia DR1 Tycho-Gaia Astrometric Solution. We investigate correlations between chemical compositions, ages, and kinematics for this sample. Stellar parameters and elemental abundances are derived from the GALAH spectra with the spectral synthesis code Spectroscopy Made Easy. We determine kinematics and dynamics, including action angles, from the Gaia astrometry and GALAH radial velocities. Stellar masses and ages are determined with Bayesian isochrone matching, using our derived stellar parameters and absolute magnitudes. We report measurements of Li, as well as Ba and we note that we employ non-LTE calculations for Li, O, Al, and Fe. We show that the use of astrometric and photometric data improves the accuracy of the derived spectroscopic parameters, especially log g. Focusing our investigation on the correlations between stellar age, iron abundance [Fe/H], and mean alpha-enhancement [α/Fe] of the magnitude-selected sample, we recover the result that stars of the high-α sequence are typically older than stars in the low-α sequence, the latter spanning iron abundances of −0.7 < [Fe/H] < +0.5. While these two sequences become indistinguishable in [α/Fe] vs. [Fe/H] at the metal-rich regime, we find that age can be used to separate stars from the extended high-α and the low-α sequence even in this regime. When dissecting the sample by stellar age, we find that the old stars (> 8 Gyr) have lower angular momenta L z than the Sun, which implies that they are on eccentric orbits and originate from the inner disk. Contrary to some previous smaller scale studies we find a continuous evolution in the high-α-sequence up to super-solar [Fe/H] rather than a gap, which has been interpreted as a separate "high-α metal-rich" population. Stars in our sample that are younger than 10 Gyr, are mainly found on the low α-sequence and show a gradient in L z from low [Fe/H] (L z > L z, ) towards higher [Fe/H] (L z < L z, ), which implies that the stars at the ends of this sequence are likely not originating from the close solar vicinity.
We present the data reduction procedures being used by the GALAH survey, carried out with the HERMES fibre-fed, multi-object spectrograph on the 3.9 m AngloAustralian Telescope. GALAH is a unique survey, targeting 1 million stars brighter than magnitude V=14 at a resolution of 28,000 with a goal to measure the abundances of 29 elements. Such a large number of high resolution spectra necessitates the development of a reduction pipeline optimized for speed, accuracy, and consistency. We outline the design and structure of the Iraf-based reduction pipeline that we developed, specifically for GALAH, to produce fully calibrated spectra aimed for subsequent stellar atmospheric parameter estimation. The pipeline takes advantage of existing Iraf routines and other readily available software so as to be simple to maintain, testable and reliable. A radial velocity and stellar atmospheric parameter estimator code is also presented, which is used for further data analysis and yields a useful verification of the reduction quality. We have used this estimator to quantify the data quality of GALAH for fibre cross-talk level ( 0.5%) and scattered light (∼ 5 counts in a typical 20 minutes exposure), resolution across the field, sky spectrum properties, wavelength solution reliability (better than 1 km s −1 accuracy) and radial velocity precision.
Galah is an ongoing high-resolution spectroscopic survey with the goal of disentangling the formation history of the Milky Way using the fossil remnants of disrupted star formation sites that are now dispersed around the Galaxy. It is targeting a randomly selected magnitude-limited (V 14) sample of stars, with the goal of observing one million objects. To date, 300,000 spectra have been obtained. Not all of them are correctly processed by parameter estimation pipelines, and we need to know about them. We present a semi-automated classification scheme that identifies different types of peculiar spectral morphologies in an effort to discover and flag potentially problematic spectra and thus help to preserve the integrity of the survey results. To this end, we employ the recently developed dimensionality reduction technique t-SNE (t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding), which enables us to represent the complex spectral morphology in a two-dimensional projection map while still preserving the properties of the local neighborhoods of spectra. We find that the majority (178,483) of the 209,533 Galah spectra considered in this study represents normal single stars, whereas 31,050 peculiar and problematic spectra with very diverse spectral features pertaining to 28,579 stars are distributed into 10 classification categories: hot stars, cool metal-poor giants, molecular absorption bands, binary stars, Hα/Hβ emission, Hα/Hβ emission superimposed on absorption, Hα/Hβ P-Cygni, Hα/Hβ inverted P-Cygni, lithium absorption, and problematic. Classified spectra with supplementary information are presented in the catalog, indicating candidates for follow-up observations and population studies of the short-lived phases of stellar evolution.
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