Suchergebnisse

Core helium-burning red clump (RC) stars are excellent standard candles in the Milky Way. These stars may have more precise distance estimates from spectrophotometry than from Gaia parallaxes beyond 3 kpc. However, RC stars have values of T eff and $\mathrm{log}g$ that are very similar to some red giant branch (RGB) stars. Especially for low-resolution spectroscopic studies where T eff, $\mathrm{log}g$, and [Fe/H] can only be estimated with limited precision, separating RC stars from RGB through established methods can incur ~20% contamination. Recently, Hawkins et al. demonstrated that the additional information in single-epoch spectra, such as the C/N ratio, can be exploited to cleanly differentiate RC and RGB stars. In this second paper of the series, we establish a data-driven mapping from spectral flux space to independently determined asteroseismic parameters, the frequency and the period spacing. From this, we identify 210,371 RC stars from the publicly available LAMOST DR3 and APOGEE DR14 data, with ~9% of contamination. We provide an RC sample of 92249 stars with a contamination of only ~3%, by restricting the combined analysis to LAMOST stars with S/Npix ≥ 75. This demonstrates that high-signal-to-noise ratio (S/N), low-resolution spectra covering a broad wavelength range can identify RC samples at least as pristine as their high-resolution counterparts. As coming and ongoing surveys such as TESS, DESI, and LAMOST will continue to improve the overlapping training spectroscopic-asteroseismic sample, the method presented in this study provides an efficient and straightforward way to derive a vast yet pristine sample of RC stars to reveal the three-dimensional (3D) structure of the Milky Way. ; Y.S.T. is grateful to be supported by the Martin A. and Helen Chooljian Membership from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the joint Carnegie-Princeton Fellowship from Princeton University and Carnegie Observatories and the Australian Research Council Discovery Program DP160103747. K.H. is funded by the Simons Foundation Society of Fellows and the Flatiron Institute Center for Computational Astrophysics in New York City. H.W.R.'s research contribution is supported by the European Research Council under the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP 7) ERC Grant Agreement n., [321035] and by the DFG's SFB-881 (A3) Program

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey III's Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment (APOGEE) is a high-resolution near-infrared spectroscopic survey covering all of the major components of the Galaxy, including the dust-obscured regions of the inner Milky Way disk and bulge. Here we present a sample of 10,341 likely red-clump stars (RC) from the first two years of APOGEE operations, selected based on their position in color-metallicity-surface-gravity-effective-temperature space using a new method calibrated using stellar evolution models and high-quality asteroseismology data. The narrowness of the RC locus in color-metallicity-luminosity space allows us to assign distances to the stars with an accuracy of 5%-10%. The sample extends to typical distances of about 3 kpc from the Sun, with some stars out to 8 kpc, and spans a volume of approximately 100 kpc(3) over 5 kpc less than or similar to R less than or similar to 14 kpc, vertical bar Z vertical bar less than or similar to 2 kpc, and -15 degrees less than or similar to Galactocentric azimuth less than or similar to 30 degrees. The APOGEE red-clump (APOGEE-RC) catalog contains photometry from the Two Micron All Sky Survey, reddening estimates, distances, line-of-sight velocities, stellar parameters and elemental abundances determined from the high-resolution APOGEE spectra, and matches to major proper motion catalogs. We determine the survey selection function for this data set and discuss how the RC selection samples the underlying stellar populations. We use this sample to limit any azimuthal variations in the median metallicity within the approximate to 45 degrees azimuthal region covered by the current sample to be <= 0.02 dex, which is more than an order of magnitude smaller than the radial metallicity gradient. This result constrains coherent non-axisymmetric flows within a few kiloparsecs from the Sun. ; NASA through Space Telescope Science Institute HST-HF-51285.01 ; NASA NAS5-26555, NNX13AE70G ; McLaughlin Fellowship at the University of Michigan ; European Research Council under the European Union 321035 ; NSF AST-1105930, AST-1311835 ; CNPq-Brazil ; Physics Frontier Center/Joint Institute for Nuclear Astrophysics (JINA) - U.S. National Science Foundation PHY 08-22648 ; Danish National Research Foundation DNRF106 ; Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness AYA-2011-27754 ; European Research Council under the European Community 338251 ; Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) SFB 963/1 ; ASTERISK project (ASTERoseismic Investigations with SONG and Kepler) - European Research Council 267864 ; MICINN AYA2011-24704 ; Alfred P. Sloan Foundation ; U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science ; University of Arizona ; Brookhaven National Laboratory ; Carnegie Mellon University ; University of Florida ; Harvard University ; Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias ; Johns Hopkins University ; Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory ; Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics ; Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics ; New Mexico State University ; New York University ; Ohio State University ; Pennsylvania State University ; University of Portsmouth ; Princeton University ; University of Tokyo ; University of Utah ; Vanderbilt University ; University of Virginia ; University of Washington ; Yale University ; McDonald Observatory