We present a low-metallicity map of the Milky Way consisting of ∼110,000 metal-poor giants with −3.5 < [Fe/H] < −0.75, based on public photometry from the second data release of the SkyMapper survey. These stars extend out to ∼7 kpc from the solar neighborhood and cover the main Galactic stellar populations, including the thick disk and the inner halo. Notably, this map can reliably differentiate metallicities down to [Fe/H] ∼ −3.0, and thus provides an unprecedented view into the ancient, metal-poor Milky Way. Among the more metal-rich stars in our sample ([Fe/H] > −2.0), we recover a clear spatial dependence of decreasing mean metallicity as a function of scale height that maps onto the thick disk component of the Milky Way. When only considering the very metal-poor stars in our sample ([Fe/H] < −2), we recover no such spatial dependence in their mean metallicity out to a scale height of ∣Z∣ ∼ 7 kpc. We find that the metallicity distribution function (MDF) of the most metal-poor stars in our sample (−3.0 < [Fe/H] < −2.3) is well fit with an exponential profile with a slope of and [Fe/H] = 1.52 ± 0.05, and slightly shifts to after accounting for target selection effects. For [Fe/H] < −2.3, the MDF is largely insensitive to scale height ∣Z∣ out to ∼5 kpc, showing that very and extremely metal-poor stars are in every galactic component.

The Milky Way’s metal-poor stars are nearby ancient objects that are used to study early chemical evolution and the assembly and structure of the Milky Way. Here we present reliable metallicities of ∼280,000 stars with −3.75 ≲ [Fe/H] ≲ −0.75 down to g = 17 derived using metallicity-sensitive photometry from the second data release of the SkyMapper Southern Survey. We use the dependency of the flux through the SkyMapper v filter on the strength of the Ca ii K absorption features, in tandem with SkyMapper u, g, i photometry, to derive photometric metallicities for these stars. We find that metallicities derived in this way compare well to metallicities derived in large-scale spectroscopic surveys, and we use such comparisons to calibrate and quantify systematics as a function of location, reddening, and color. We find good agreement with metallicities from the APOGEE, LAMOST, and GALAH surveys, based on a standard deviation of σ ∼ 0.25 dex of the residuals of our photometric metallicities with respect to metallicities from those surveys. We also compare our derived photometric metallicities to metallicities presented in a number of high-resolution spectroscopic studies to validate the low-metallicity end ([Fe/H] < −2.5) of our photometric metallicity determinations. In such comparisons, we find the metallicities of stars with photometric [Fe/H] < −2.5 in our catalog show no significant offset and a scatter of σ ∼ 0.31 dex level relative to those in high-resolution work when considering the cooler stars (g − i > 0.65) in our sample. We also present an expanded catalog containing photometric metallicities of ∼720,000 stars as a data table for further exploration of the metal-poor Milky Way.

No abstract