The Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment (APOGEE)

By S. Majewski, R. Schiavon, Peter M. Frinchaboy, C. A. Prieto, R. Barkhouser, D. Bizyaev, Basil Blank, S. Brunner, A. Burton, Ricardo Carrera and 69 more. 2007

1,441 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment (APOGEE), one of the programs in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III (SDSS-III), has now completed its systematic, homogeneous spectroscopic survey sampling all major populations of the Milky Way. After a three-year observing campaign on the Sloan 2.5 m Telescope, APOGEE has collected a half million high-resolution (R ∼ 22,500), high signal-to-noise ratio (>100), infrared (1.51–1.70 μm) spectra for 146,000 stars, with time series information via repeat visits to most of these stars. This paper describes the motivations for the survey and its overall design—hardware, field placement, target selection, operations—and gives an overview of these aspects as well as the data reduction, analysis, and products. An index is also given to the complement of technical papers that describe various critical survey components in detail. Finally, we discuss the achieved survey performance and illustrate the variety of potential uses of the data products by way of a number of science demonstrations, which span from time series analysis of stellar spectral variations and radial velocity variations from stellar companions, to spatial maps of kinematics, metallicity, and abundance patterns across the Galaxy and as a function of age, to new views of the interstellar medium, the chemistry of star clusters, and the discovery of rare stellar species. As part of SDSS-III Data Release 12 and later releases, all of the APOGEE data products are publicly available.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/87e0563ab0031219385f9f1561ed8fc75bac8d4e

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Citations in the corpus

Gaia-2MASS 3D maps of Galactic interstellar dust within 3 kpc (2019, methodology): “Rezaei Kh. et al. (2017, 2018) developed a nonparametric 3D inversion method based on an isotropic Gaussian process to derive the 3D dust distribution and tested then applied their new technique on extinction-distance measurements derived from the APOKASC catalog of Rodrigues et al. (2014) and APOGE”
THE APOGEE RED-CLUMP CATALOG: PRECISE DISTANCES, VELOCITIES, AND HIGH-RESOLUTION ELEMENTAL ABUNDANCES OVER A LARGE AREA OF THE MILKY WAY'S DISK (2014, methodology): “However, most APOGEE targets are selected using a simple color cut, (J − Ks)0 ≥ 0.5, typically in three separate H-band magnitude ranges (Zasowski et al. 2013), and this simple selection allows the fraction of spectroscopically-observed objects to be determined as a function of color (J −Ks)0 and…”
REVISED STELLAR PROPERTIES OF KEPLER TARGETS FOR THE QUARTER 1–16 TRANSIT DETECTION RUN (2013, methodology): “…amount of spectroscopic follow-up observations have been performed within the Kepler Community Follow-Up Program (CFOP23), and systematic spectroscopic surveys of the Kepler field using multi-object fiber-fed spectrographs are currently in progress (Zasowski et al. 2013; Pinsonneault et al. 2013).”
Estimating stellar birth radii and the time evolution of Milky Way’s ISM metallicity gradient (2018, methodology): “…et al. (2017b) recently measured the metallicity gradients of mono-age stellar populations using the high-quality CoRoGEE dataset (Anders et al. 2017a) - a sample of red giants with chemical abundances measured by APOGEE (Majewski et al. 2010, 2017) and asteroseismic ages from the CoRoT satellite.”
MESA ISOCHRONES AND STELLAR TRACKS (MIST). I. SOLAR-SCALED MODELS (2016, background): “On the observational front, large quantities of precise data from recent and ongoing space- and ground-based programs have initiated an explosive growth in fields such as asteroseismology (e.g., CoRoT; Baglin et al. 2006, Kepler; Gilliland et al. 2010), time-domain astronomy (e.g., Palomar Transient”
THE STELLAR POPULATION STRUCTURE OF THE GALACTIC DISK (2015, background): “Full details on the APOGEE target selection can be found in Zasowski et al. (2013).”
The age–metallicity structure of the Milky Way disc using APOGEE (2017, methodology): “Targets were selected in general from the 2MASS point-source catalog, employing a dereddened (J − KS )0 ≥ 0.5 colour cut (in the fields which are of interest here) in up to three apparent H magnitude bins (for a full description of the APOGEE target selection, see Zasowski et al. 2013).”
Chemical tagging with APOGEE: Discovery of a large population of N-rich stars in the inner Galaxy (2016, methodology): “The surface gravity criterion is meant to avoid contamination of the sample by nearby dwarfs—which are in any case extremely rare in APOGEE bulge pointings, given the shallower magnitude limit adopted in these fields—see Zasowski et al. (2013) for details.”
Target Selection for the SDSS-IV APOGEE-2 Survey (2017, methodology): “During 2011–2014, APOGEE obtained high-resolution (R ∼ 22, 000), high SNR, H-band spectra for ∼163,000 stars in the bulge, disk, and halo of the MW (Zasowski et al. 2013; Holtzman et al. 2015), spanning up to ∼12 kpc away in the midplane.”
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),…”
The Close Binary Fraction of Solar-type Stars Is Strongly Anticorrelated with Metallicity (2018, background): “…spectroscopic survey (data release 13) measured the effective temperatures, surface gravities, metallicities, and RVs of ≈164,000 stars in various environments, including the galactic disk, bulge, and halo (Zasowski et al. 2013; Holtzman et al. 2015; Nidever et al. 2015; Albareti et al. 2017).”