THE METALLICITY DISTRIBUTION FUNCTIONS OF SEGUE G AND K DWARFS: CONSTRAINTS FOR DISK CHEMICAL EVOLUTION AND FORMATION

By K. Schlesinger, Jennifer A. Johnson, C. Rockosi, Y. S. Lee, H. Morrison, R. Schoenrich, C. Allende Prieto, Timothy C. Beers, Brian Yanny, P. Harding and 7 more. 2011

68 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present the metallicity distribution function (MDF) for 24,270 G and 16,847 K dwarfs at distances from 0.2 to 2.3 kpc from the Galactic plane, based on spectroscopy from the Sloan Extension for Galactic Understanding and Exploration (SEGUE) survey. This stellar sample is significantly larger in both number and volume than previous spectroscopic analyses, which were limited to the solar vicinity, making it ideal for comparison with local volume-limited samples and Galactic models. For the first time, we have corrected the MDF for the various observational biases introduced by the SEGUE target-selection strategy. SEGUE is particularly notable for its sample of K dwarfs, which are too faint to examine spectroscopically far from the solar neighborhood. The MDF of both spectral types becomes more metal-poor with increasing |Z|, which reflects the transition from a sample with small [α/Fe] values at small heights to one with enhanced [α/Fe] above 1 kpc. Comparison of our SEGUE distributions to those of two different Milky Way models reveals that both are more metal-rich than our observed distributions at all heights above the plane. Our unbiased observations of G and K dwarfs provide valuable constraints over the |Z|-height range of the Milky Way disk for chemical and dynamical Galaxy evolution models, previously only calibrated to the solar neighborhood, with particular utility for thin- and thick-disk formation models.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

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Citations in the corpus

Yule-Simpson’s paradox in Galactic Archaeology (2019, background): “This phenomenon could be understood by taking into account that the fraction of metal-poor old stars increases with |z|, thus giving rise to a negative gradient for the total population (see results with SEGUE G-dwarfs – Schlesinger et al. 2011, RAVE – Boeche et al. 2013b, and LAMOST data – Wang et ”
CHEMICAL CARTOGRAPHY WITH APOGEE: LARGE-SCALE MEAN METALLICITY MAPS OF THE MILKY WAY DISK (2013, background): “The structure of the disk is also reflected in detailed abundances, with stars at greater distances from the plane typically having higher [α/Fe] ratios than stars closer to the plane (e.g., Lee et al. 2011; Bovy et al. 2012c; Schlesinger et al. 2012).”
OXYGEN ABUNDANCES IN NEARBY FGK STARS AND THE GALACTIC CHEMICAL EVOLUTION OF THE LOCAL DISK AND HALO (2013, background): “Nevertheless, recent results from the SEGUE/SDSS collaboration show that these models may have difficulties when dealing with observations of the Galaxy on a larger-scale (e.g., Schlesinger et al. 2012).”
The GALAH survey: scientific motivation (2015, background): “The thin disc stars have [Fe/H] in the range −0.7 to +0.5, while most of the thick disc stars have [Fe/H] between about −1.0 and −0.3, with tails extending to −2.0 and −0.1 (Schlesinger et al. 2012).”
INSIDE OUT AND UPSIDE DOWN: TRACING THE ASSEMBLY OF A SIMULATED DISK GALAXY USING MONO-AGE STELLAR POPULATIONS (2013, background): “…gradients in the vertical direction are even more well established; observations in the solar neighborhood and beyond find that [α/Fe] increases and [Fe/H] decreases with height above the disk plane (e.g., Bensby et al. 2003; Ruchti et al. 2010; Lee et al. 2011; Schlesinger et al. 2012).”
Using chemical tagging to redefine the interface of the Galactic disc and halo (2015, background): “…even though the halo is thought to extend to metallicities as large as –0.50 dex (e.g. Nissen & Schuster 2011), the Galactic disk populations will dominate at metallicities above –0.80 dex (e.g. Schlesinger et al. 2012) particularly if they follow the sinusoidal disk-like pattern in Figure 3(b).”
A DIRECT DYNAMICAL MEASUREMENT OF THE MILKY WAY'S DISK SURFACE DENSITY PROFILE, DISK SCALE LENGTH, AND DARK MATTER PROFILE AT 4 kpc ≲ R ≲ 9 kpc (2013, methodology): “…the distances on the scale of An et al. (2009), An09 hereafter, which was used in many other analyses of the 4 SEGUE G and K-dwarf samples (e.g., Schlesinger et al. 2012; Zhang et al. 2013), and which appears to provide more accurate distances from the kinematical tests of Schönrich et al.…”
Target Selection for the SDSS-IV APOGEE-2 Survey (2017, background): “These are critical factors to understand when analyzing data from any survey, to account for selection effects and biases in the base sample (e.g., Schlesinger et al. 2012).”
CHEMICAL CARTOGRAPHY WITH APOGEE: METALLICITY DISTRIBUTION FUNCTIONS AND THE CHEMICAL STRUCTURE OF THE MILKY WAY DISK (2015, background): “This result is commonly known as the “G-dwarf problem” (e.g., Pagel & Patchett 1975; Rocha-Pinto & Maciel 1996; Schlesinger et al. 2012).”
The Gaia-ESO Survey : radial metallicity gradients and age-metallicity relation of stars in the Milky Way disk (2014, methodology): “…gradients of the disk using data from recent large-scale spectroscopic surveys, such as SEGUE/SDSS (e.g. Lee et al. 2011; Bovy et al. 2012b,c; Schlesinger et al. 2012; Cheng et al. 2012), RAVE (e.g. Boeche et al. 2013), and APOGEE (e.g. Anders et al. 2013; Hayden et al. 2013), as well as…”
Chemodynamics of the Milky Way - I. The first year of APOGEE data (2013, background): “…volume covered by spectroscopic stellar surveys, key observables of chemical evolution such as radial metallicity gradients in the disc are still confined to Heliocentric distances of ∼ 2−3 kpc,13 and often affected by non-trivial selection biases (e.g., Bovy et al. 2012b; Schlesinger et al. 2012).”