The Radial Velocity Experiment (RAVE): First Data Release

Abstract

We present the first data release of the Radial Velocity Experiment ( RAVE), an ambitious spectroscopic survey to measure radial velocities and stellar atmosphere parameters (temperature, metallicity, and surface gravity) of up to one million stars using the Six Degree Field multiobject spectrograph on the 1.2 m UK Schmidt Telescope of the Anglo-Australian Observatory. The RAVE program started in 2003, obtaining medium-resolution spectra (median R ¼ 7500) in the Ca-triplet region (8410-8795 8) for southern hemisphere stars drawn from the Tycho-2 and SuperCOSMOS catalogs, in the magnitude range 9 < I < 12. The first data release is described in this paper and contains radial velocities for 24,748 individual stars (25,274 measurements when including reobservations). Those data were obtained on 67 nights between 2003 April 11 and 2004 April 3. The total sky coverage within this data release is $4760 deg 2 . The average signal-to-noise ratio of the observed spectra is 29.5, and 80% of the radial velocities have uncertainties better than 3.4 km s À1 . Combining internal errors and zero-point errors, the mode is found to be 2 km s À1 . Repeat observations are used to assess the stability of our radial velocity solution, resulting in a variance of 2.8 km s À1 . We demonstrate that the radial velocities derived for the first data set do not show any systematic trend with color or signal-to-noise ratio. The RAVE radial velocities are complemented in the data release with proper motions from Starnet 2.0, Tycho-2, and SuperCOSMOS, in addition to photometric data from the major optical and infrared catalogs (Tycho-2, USNO-B, DENIS, and the Two Micron All Sky Survey). The data release can be accessed via the RAVE Web site.

The Milky Way's rotation curve out to 100 kpc and its constraint on the Galactic mass distribution

“…Dehnen & Binney 1998a;Bensby et al 2003;Soubiran et al 2003). The value of Rσ agrees well with the recent determination of Sharma et al (2014), who report Rσ ∼ 14 kpc based on the RAVE (Steinmetz et al 2006) data. In principle, the mean radial motion V R involved in the second trend of variations should be zero under our axisymmetric assumption.…”

Are ancient dwarf satellites the building blocks of the Galactic halo?

“…We recall here a number of ongoing and planned spectroscopic MW survey, such as RAVE (Steinmetz et al 2006), SEGUE (Yanny et al 2009), APOGEE (Majewski et al 2010), HERMES (Freeman 2010), Gaia-ESO (Gilmore et al 2012).…”

Vertical oscillations of fluid and stellar discs

“…These observations come free three surveys: the Sloan Extension for Galactic Understanding and Exploration (SEGUE; Yanny et al (2009)), the RAdial Velocity Experiment (RAVE; Steinmetz et al (2006)), and the LAM-OST Experiment for Galactic Understanding and Exploration (LEGUE; Deng et al (2012)). These surveys provide full six-dimensional phase space information for tens of thousands of stars within a few kiloparsecs of the Sun.…”