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Related papers: The SEGUE K Giant Survey. III. Quantifying Galacti…

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We have begun a survey of the structure of the Milky Way halo, as well as the halos of other Local Group galaxies, as traced by their constituent giant stars. These giant stars are identified via large area, CCD photometric campaigns. Here…

We use extensive gravity-sensitive DDO 51 photometry over 5100 square degrees, combined with SDSS broadband photometry, to select a catalog of $\sim 4,000$ giant stars covering a large fraction of the high Galactic latitude sky and reaching…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2016-12-14 Colin T. Slater , David L. Nidever , Jeffrey A. Munn , Eric F. Bell , Steven R. Majewski

We develop statistical methods for identifying star streams in the halo of the Milky Way galaxy that exploit observed spatial and radial velocity distributions. Within a great circle, departures of the observed spatial distribution from…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2015-06-03 Charles King , Warren R. Brown , Margaret J. Geller , Scott J. Kenyon

To determine the nature of the recently discovered, ring-like stellar structure at the Galactic anticenter, we have collected spectra of a set of presumed constituent M giants selected from the 2MASS point source catalog. Radial velocities…

The Milky Way halo has been built-up over cosmic time through the accretion and dissolution of star clusters and dwarf galaxies as well as through their complex interactions with the Galactic disc. Traces of these accreted structures…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2026-01-14 Kris Youakim , Karin Lind

The Milky Way's million degree gaseous halo contains a considerable amount of mass that, depending on its structural properties, can be a significant mass component. In order to analyze the structure of the Galactic halo, we use XMM-Newton…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2015-06-15 Matthew Miller , Joel Bregman

We derive the fraction of substructure in the Galactic halo using a sample of over 10,000 spectroscopically-confirmed halo giant stars from the LAMOST spectroscopic survey. By observing 100 synthetic models along each line of sight with the…

Blue Horizontal Branch (BHB) stars, excellent distant tracers for probing the Milky Way's halo density profile, are distinguished in the $(g-r)_0$ vs $(i-z)_0$ color space from another class of stars, blue straggler stars (BSs). We develop…

We have used data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) Data Release 5 to explore the overall structure and substructure of the stellar halo of the Milky Way using about 4 million color-selected main sequence turn-off stars. We fit…

Currently only a small number of Milky Way (MW) stars are known to exist beyond 100 kpc from the Galactic center. Though the distribution of these stars in the outer halo is believed to be sparse, they can provide evidence of more recent…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2017-08-02 Robyn E. Sanderson , Amy Secunda , Kathryn V. Johnston , John J. Bochanski

The majority of the Milky Way's stellar halo consists of debris from our Galaxy's last major merger, the Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus (GSE). In the past few years, stars from GSE have been kinematically and chemically studied in the inner $30$…

Halo stars orbit within the potential of the Milky Way and hence their kinematics can be used to understand the underlying mass distribution. However, the inferred mass distribution depends sensitively upon assumptions made on the density…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2015-06-22 Prajwal R. Kafle , Sanjib Sharma , Geraint F. Lewis , Joss Bland-Hawthorn

We present a panoramic map of the entire Milky Way halo north of dec~-30 degrees (~30,000 deg^2), constructed by applying the matched-filter technique to the Pan-STARRS1 3Pi Survey dataset. Using single-epoch photometry reaching to g~22, we…

In recent years, massive new spectroscopic data sets, such as the over half million stellar spectra obtained during the course of SDSS (in particular its sub-survey SEGUE), have provided the quantitative detail required to formulate a…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2015-06-03 Timothy C. Beers , Daniela Carollo

An all high-latitude sky survey for cool carbon giant stars in the Galactic halo has revealed 75 such stars, of which the majority are new detections. Of these, more than half are clustered on a Great Circle on the sky which intersects the…

Astrophysics · Physics 2009-10-31 Rodrigo Ibata , Geraint F. Lewis , Michael Irwin , Edward Totten , Thomas Quinn

We use numerical simulations to examine the substructure within galactic and cluster mass halos that form within a hierarchical universe. Clusters are easily reproduced with a steep mass spectrum of thousands of substructure clumps that…

We investigate the structure of the Milky Way's stellar halo within 70 kpc of the Sun using a wide-field photometric catalog obtained from the Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC) Subaru Strategic Program (HSC-SSP). We employ a large sample of…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2026-04-14 Yoshihisa Suzuki , Masashi Chiba , Rosemary F. G. Wyse , Shunichi Horigome

Abridged: We estimate the distances to ~48 million stars detected by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and map their 3D number density distribution in 100 < D < 20 kpc range over 6,500 deg^2 of sky. The data show strong evidence for a Galaxy…

We present the latitude-normalized radial velocity (vb) distribution of 3318 subsolar metallicity, V<13.5 stars from the Grid Giant Star Survey (GGSS) in Southern Hemisphere fields. The sample includes giants mostly within ~5 kpc from the…

We report the discovery of diffuse stellar substructure in the Milky Way's outer halo toward Bo\"otes, unveiled by deep imaging data of the Subaru/Hyper Suprime-Cam. This substructure is detected as an excess of faint main-sequence stars,…

Astrophysics of Galaxies · Physics 2026-04-14 Yoshihisa Suzuki , Masashi Chiba , Rosemary F. G. Wyse