Halo streams in the 7th SDSS data release
R. Klement (MPIA), H.-W. Rix (MPIA), C. Flynn (Tuorla), B. Fuchs, (ARI), T. C. Beers (MSU), C. Allende Prieto (UT), D. Bizyaev (APO), H., Brewington (APO), Y. S. Lee (MSU), E. Malanushenko (APO), V. Malanushenko, (APO), D. Oravetz (APO), K. Pan (APO), P. Re Fiorentin (MPIA)

TL;DR
This study detects and characterizes stellar halo streams in the solar neighborhood using SDSS data, revealing known and new streams through phase-space analysis of metal-poor stars.
Contribution
The paper introduces a method to identify stellar streams in phase space using SDSS data, uncovering two new halo streams and confirming known ones without assuming a specific gravitational potential.
Findings
Identification of at least five phase-space overdensities of halo stars.
Discovery of two new genuine halo streams based on kinematics and metallicity.
Matching of one stream to a spatial overdensity previously found.
Abstract
We have detected stellar halo streams in the solar neighborhood using data from the 7th public data release of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), which includes the directed stellar program SEGUE: Sloan Extension For Galactic Understanding and Exploration. In order to derive distances to each star, we used the metallicity-dependent photometric parallax relation from Ivezic et al. (2008) for which we examine and quantify the accuracy. Our final sample consists of 22,321 nearby (d < 2 kpc), metal-poor ([Fe/H] < -0.5) main-sequence stars with 6D estimates of position and space velocity. We characterize the orbits of these stars through suitable kinematic proxies for their "effective" integrals of motion, angular momentum, eccentricity, and orbital polar angle and compare the observed distribution to expectations from a smooth distribution in four [Fe/H] bins. On this basis we identify at…
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