New Resources to Explore the Old Galaxy: Mining the SDSS
Abstract
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) is collecting photometry and intermediate resolution spectra for ~ 10**5 stars in the thick-disk and stellar halo of the Milky Way. This massive dataset can be used to infer the properties of the stars that make up these structures, and considerably deepen our vision of the old components of the Galaxy. We devise tools for automatic analysis of the SDSS photometric and spectroscopic data based on plane-parallel line-blanketed LTE model atmospheres and fast optimization algorithms. A preliminary study of about 5000 stars in the Early Data Release gives a hint of the vast amount of information that the SDSS stellar sample contains.
Cite
@article{arxiv.astro-ph/0304352,
title = {New Resources to Explore the Old Galaxy: Mining the SDSS},
author = {C. Allende Prieto and T. C. Beers and Y. Li and H. J. Newberg and R. Wilhelm and B. Yanny},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/0304352},
year = {2007}
}
Comments
12 pages, 9 figures, to appear in the Carnegie Observatories Astrophysics Series, Vol. 4: Origin and Evolution of the Elements, ed. A. McWilliam and M. Rauch; version with full res. images available at http://hebe.as.utexas.edu/recent_publi.html