The GALAH survey: scientific motivation

By G. D. Silva, Kenneth C. Freeman, J. Bland-Hawthorn, S. Martell, E. W. Boer, Martin Asplund, S. Keller, S. Sharma, D. Zucker, T. Zwitter and 37 more. 2015

564 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The Galactic Archaeology with HERMES (GALAH) survey is a large high-resolution spectroscopic survey using the newly commissioned High Efficiency and Resolution Multi-Element Spectrograph (HERMES) on the Anglo-Australian Telescope. The HERMES spectrograph provides high-resolution (R ~ 28 000) spectra in four passbands for 392 stars simultaneously over a 2 deg field of view. The goal of the survey is to unravel the formation and evolutionary history of the Milky Way, using fossil remnants of ancient star formation events which have been disrupted and are now dispersed throughout the Galaxy. Chemical tagging seeks to identify such dispersed remnants solely from their common and unique chemical signatures; these groups are unidentifiable from their spatial, photometric or kinematic properties. To carry out chemical tagging, the GALAH survey will acquire spectra for a million stars down to V ~ 14. The HERMES spectra of FGK stars contain absorption lines from 29 elements including light proton-capture elements, α-elements, odd-Z elements, iron-peak elements and n-capture elements from the light and heavy s-process and the r-process. This paper describes the motivation and planned execution of the GALAH survey, and presents some results on the first-light performance of HERMES.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

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Citations in the corpus

Yule-Simpson’s paradox in Galactic Archaeology (2019, background): “…(Rauer et al. 2014) asteroseismic missions in the near future, as well as isochrone age determination from spectroscopic surveys, such as GALAH (De Silva et al. 2015), Gaia-ESO (Gilmore et al. 2012), APOGEE, WEAVE, SDSS-V’s Milky Way Mapper (Kollmeier et al. 2017), and 4MOST, combined with Gaia…”
The Galaxy in Context: Structural, Kinematic, and Integrated Properties (2016, background): “…Radial Velocity Experiment (RAVE; Steinmetz et al. 2006); APOGEE (Allende Prieto et al. 2008); LAMOST Experiment for Galactic Understanding and Exploration (LEGUE; Deng et al. 2012); Gaia ESO Survey (GES; Gilmore et al. 2012); and Galactic Archaeology with Hermes (GALAH; De Silva et al. 2015).”
SPECTRAL PROPERTIES OF COOL STARS: EXTENDED ABUNDANCE ANALYSIS OF 1,617 PLANET-SEARCH STARS (2016, background): “These low to medium resolution spectroscopic surveys are deriving stellar parameters for tens of thousands to millions of stars with smaller numbers of higher resolution observations for calibration (De Silva et al. 2015; Holtzman et al. 2015; Smiljanic et al. 2014).”
The GALAH Survey: Second Data Release (2018, methodology): “The Galactic Archaeology with HERMES (GALAH) survey1 brings a unique perspective to the outstanding problem of understanding the Galaxy’s history (De Silva et al. 2015; Martell et al. 2017).”
The GALAH survey and Gaia DR2: dissecting the stellar disc’s phase space by age, action, chemistry, and location (2018, methodology): “This survey brings a unique perspective to Galactic archaeology by measuring accurate radial velocities and up to 30 elemental abundances for about a million stars (De Silva et al. 2015; Martell et al. 2017).”
The biggest splash (2019, background): “In particular, spectroscopic information from the APOGEE (Majewski et al. 2017; Garcı́a Pérez et al. 2016) DR14 (Abolfathi et al. 2018), LAMOST DR3 (Large Sky Area MultiObject Fibre Spectroscopic Telescope, Cui et al. 2012; Zhao et al. 2012), RAVE (Steinmetz et al. 2006) DR5 (Kunder et al. 2017), G”
Gaia FGK benchmark stars: Effective temperatures and surface gravities (2015, background): “Examples of such surveys are the Gaia-ESO Public Spectroscopic Survey (Gilmore et al. 2012; Randich et al. 2013), RAVE (Steinmetz et al. 2006), APOGEE (Allende Prieto et al. 2008), and GALAH (De Silva et al. 2015).”
Estimating stellar birth radii and the time evolution of Milky Way’s ISM metallicity gradient (2018, methodology): “Such datasets will become available from the high-resolution spectroscopic surveys GALAH (De Silva et al. 2015) and GaiaESO (Gilmore et al. 2012) within 2-3 kpc from the Sun, and APOGEE, SDSS-V’s Milky Way Mapper (MWM, Kollmeier et al. 2017), WEAVE (Dalton et al. 2012), and 4MOST (de Jong et al.…”
The GALAH survey: observational overview and Gaia DR1 companion (2016, methodology): “A thorough explanation of the GALAH survey science goals is given in De Silva et al. (2015).”
Stellar ages and masses in the solar neighbourhood: Bayesian analysis using spectroscopy and Gaia DR1 parallaxes (2018, methodology): “We intend to carry out such a study with the GALAH survey (De Silva et al. 2015) for the approximately half a million stars contained in the GALAH Data Release 2, roughly two-thirds of which will be dwarfs; besides the enormous sample size, a further advantage with GALAH is the very straightforward…”
Evidence from the H3 Survey That the Stellar Halo Is Entirely Comprised of Substructure (2020, background): “Thanks to large stellar spectroscopic surveys, e.g., RAVE (Steinmetz et al. 2006), SEGUE (Yanny et al. 2009), LAMOST (Cui et al. 2012), GALAH (De Silva et al. 2015), APOGEE (Majewski et al. 2017), and the Gaia mission (Gaia Collaboration et al. 2018), integrals of motion and chemical abundances…”
The Payne: Self-consistent ab initio Fitting of Stellar Spectra (2018, background): “Surveys such as APOGEE (Majewski et al. 2017), GALAH (De Silva et al. 2015), and Gaia–ESO (Smiljanic et al. 2014) are collecting high-quality spectra for 105–106 stars with a spectral resolution R; 25,000, orders of magnitudes more stars than previous samples.”
Painting a portrait of the Galactic disc with its stellar clusters (2020, unknown): “Ground-based spectroscopic surveys such as APOGEE (Majewski et al. 2017), Gaia-ESO (Gilmore et al. 2012; Randich et al. 2013), GALAH (De Silva et al. 2015), LAMOST (Cui et al. 2012), or the upcoming WEAVE (Dalton et al. 2012) and 4MOST (de Jong et al. 2012; Guiglion et al. 2019) will provide…”
MESA ISOCHRONES AND STELLAR TRACKS (MIST). I. SOLAR-SCALED MODELS (2016, background): “…astronomy (e.g., Palomar Transient Factory; Law et al. 2009, Pan-STARRS; Kaiser et al. 2010), galactic archaeology (e.g., APOGEE; Zasowski et al. 2013, GALAH; De Silva et al. 2015), and resolved stellar populations (e.g., the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) program PHAT; Dalcanton et al. 2012).”
THE K2 ECLIPTIC PLANE INPUT CATALOG (EPIC) AND STELLAR CLASSIFICATIONS OF 138,600 TARGETS IN CAMPAIGNS 1–8 (2015, methodology): “Future observations from large-scale spectroscopic surveys such as APOGEE (Allende Prieto et al. 2008) and GALAH (De Silva et al. 2015) as well as parallaxes from Gaia (Perryman 2005) will considerably improve the classifications provided here.”
The Lives of Stars: Insights from the TGAS–RAVE–LAMOST Data Set (2018, background): “…is explored early in F and G disk stars in Bensby et al. (2003) and Bensby et al. (2005), or more recently in, e.g., Ting et al. (2016) in APOGEE or Kos et al. (2018) in GALAH (Galactic Archaeology with HERMES, the High Efficiency and Resolution Multi-Element Spectrograph; De Silva et al. 2015).”