***********************************************************
OATS-DAUT SEMINAR
***********************************************************
Speaker:
Tomaz Zwitter (Univ. of Ljubljana)
Title:
Present state and promises of the RAVE survey
Date: Wednesday, March 19th, 2008
Time: 12:00
Venue: Villa Bazzoni
***********************************************************
Abstract: The growing awareness of the importance of the 'fossil record' in the
Milky Way Galaxy in constraining galaxy formation theory is reflected by the
increasing number of missions designed to unravel the formation history of
the Galaxy. Stellar spectroscopy plays a crucial role in these studies, not
only providing radial velocities as a key component of the 6-dimensional
phase space of stellar positions and velocities, but also providing
much-needed information on the gravity and chemical composition of
individual stars. I will present the RAdial Velocity Experiment (RAVE), an
ambitious spectroscopic survey which already secured over a quarter million
stellar spectra with a promise of quadrupling the sample in the next few
years. For many of these spectra not only the radial velocity but also
stellar parameters have been determined from spectral analysis. This
requires automated reduction, analysis and classification techniques which
had to be checked against other spectroscopic and photometric datasets. The
adopted solutions are important for planning of future large scale
spectroscopic surveys and also for any RAVE user who wants to take full
advantage of the claimed rather impressive typical errors: less than 2 km/s
error in radial velocity, 400 K in temperature, 0.5 dex in gravity and 0.2
dex in metallicity. The talk will present the first two data releases
(Steinmetz et al. 2006, Zwitter et al. 2008) and summarize the scientific
results already obtained.
***********************************************************
contact: Paolo Molaro (OATS)