The Astropy Project supports and fosters the development of open-source and openly developed Python packages that provide commonly needed functionality to the astronomical community. A key element of the Astropy Project is the core package astropy, which serves as the foundation for more specialized projects and packages. In this article, we provide an overview of the organization of the Astropy project and summarize key features in the core package, as of the recent major release, version 2.0. We then describe the project infrastructure designed to facilitate and support development for a broader ecosystem of interoperable packages. We conclude with a future outlook of planned new features and directions for the broader Astropy Project.

This paper documents the 16th data release (DR16) from the Sloan Digital Sky Surveys (SDSS), the fourth and penultimate from the fourth phase (SDSS-IV). This is the first release of data from the Southern Hemisphere survey of the Apache Point Observatory Galactic Evolution Experiment 2 (APOGEE-2); new data from APOGEE-2 North are also included. DR16 is also notable as the final data release for the main cosmological program of the Extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (eBOSS), and all raw and reduced spectra from that project are released here. DR16 also includes all the data from the Time Domain Spectroscopic Survey and new data from the SPectroscopic IDentification of ERosita Survey programs, both of which were co-observed on eBOSS plates. DR16 has no new data from the Mapping Nearby Galaxies at Apache Point Observatory (MaNGA) survey (or the MaNGA Stellar Library “MaStar”). We also preview future SDSS-V operations (due to start in 2020), and summarize plans for the final SDSS-IV data release (DR17).

In a companion paper by Koposov et al., RR Lyrae from Gaia Data Release 2 are used to demonstrate that stars in the Orphan stream have velocity vectors significantly misaligned with the stream track, suggesting that it has received a large gravitational perturbation from a satellite of the Milky Way. We argue that such a mismatch cannot arise due to any realistic static Milky Way potential and then explore the perturbative effects of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). We find that the LMC can produce precisely the observed motiontrack mismatch and we therefore use the Orphan stream to measure the mass of the Cloud. We simultaneously fit the Milky Way and LMC potentials and infer that a total LMC mass of 1.38 +0.27 −0.24 × 10 11 M is required to bend the Orphan Stream, showing for the first time that the LMC has a large and measurable effect on structures orbiting the Milky Way. This has far-reaching consequences for any technique which assumes that tracers are orbiting a static Milky Way. Furthermore, we measure the Milky Way mass within 50 kpc to be 3.80 +0.14 −0.11 × 10 11 M . Finally, we use these results to predict that, due to the reflex motion of the Milky Way in response to the LMC, the outskirts of the Milky Way's stellar halo should exhibit a bulk, upwards motion.

Aims. Several kinematic and chemical substructures have been recently found amongst Milky Way halo stars with retrograde motions. It is currently unclear how these various structures are related to each other. This Letter aims to shed light on this issue. Methods. We explore the retrograde halo with an augmented version of the Gaia DR2 RVS sample, extended with data from three large spectroscopic surveys, namely RAVE, APOGEE and LAMOST. In this dataset, we identify several structures using the HDBSCAN clustering algorithm. We discuss their properties and possible links using all the available chemical and dynamical information.Results. In concordance with previous work, we find that stars with [Fe/H] < −1 have more retrograde motions than those with [Fe/H] > −1. The retrograde halo contains a mixture of debris from objects like Gaia-Enceladus, Sequoia, and even the chemically defined thick-disc. We find that the Sequoia has a smaller range in orbital energies than previously suggested and is confined to high-energy. Sequoia could be a small galaxy in itself, but since it overlaps both in integrals-of-motion space and chemical abundance space with the less bound debris of Gaia-Enceladus, its nature cannot be fully settled yet. In the low-energy part of the halo we find evidence for at least one more distinct structure: Thamnos. Stars in Thamnos are on low inclination, mildly eccentric retrograde orbits, moving at v φ ≈ −150 km/s, and are chemically distinct from the other structures. Conclusions. Even with the excellent Gaia DR2 data it remains challenging to piece together all the fragments found in the retrograde halo. At this point, we are very much in need of large datasets with high-quality high-resolution spectra and tailored high-resolution hydrodynamical simulations of galaxy mergers.