Mapping the Distant and Metal-Poor Milky Way with SDSS-V
Abstract
The fifth-generation Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS-V) is conducting the first all-sky low-resolution spectroscopic survey of the Milky Way's stellar halo. We describe the stellar parameter pipeline for the SDSS-V halo survey, which simultaneously models spectra, broadband photometry, and parallaxes to derive stellar parameters, metallicities, alpha abundances, and distances. The resulting BOSS-MINESweeper catalog is validated across a wide range of stellar parameters and metallicities using star clusters and a comparison to high-resolution spectroscopic surveys. We demonstrate several scientific capabilities of this dataset: identifying the most chemically peculiar stars in our Galaxy, discovering and mapping distant halo substructures, and measuring the all--sky dynamics of the Milky Way on the largest scales. The BOSS-MINESweeper catalog for SDSS DR19 is publicly available and will be updated for future data releases.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2508.00978,
title = {Mapping the Distant and Metal-Poor Milky Way with SDSS-V},
author = {Vedant Chandra and Phillip A. Cargile and Alexander P. Ji and Charlie Conroy and Hans-Walter Rix and Emily Cunningham and Bruno Dias and Chervin Laporte and William Cerny and Guilherme Limberg and Avrajit Bandyopadhyay and Ana Bonaca and Andrew R. Casey and John Donor and Jose G. Fernandez-Trincado and Peter M. Frinchaboy and Pramod Gupta and Keith Hawkins and Jennifer A. Johnson and Juna A. Kollmeier and Madeline Lucey and Ilija Medan and Szabolcs Meszaros and Sean Morrison and Jose Sanchez-Gallego and Andrew K. Saydjari and Conor Sayres and Kevin C. Schlaufman and Keivan G. Stassun and Jamie Tayar and Zachary Way},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2508.00978},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
31 pages, 19 figures; Submitted to AAS Journals;