RAVE as a Gaia precursor: what to expect from the Gaia RVS?

TL;DR

RAVE provides extensive spectroscopic stellar data comparable to Gaia RVS, serving as a prototype for Gaia's future data releases by offering radial velocities, stellar parameters, and chemical abundances.

Contribution

This paper demonstrates how RAVE's data and methodology serve as a precursor and prototype for Gaia RVS, highlighting its relevance for upcoming Gaia data releases.

Findings

RAVE collected spectra for over 480,000 stars.

Data includes radial velocities, stellar parameters, and chemical abundances.

RAVE's dataset is comparable to Gaia RVS expectations.

Abstract

The Radial Velocity Experiment (RAVE) is a large wide-field spectroscopic stellar survey of the Milky Way. Over the period 2003-2013, 574,630 spectra for 483,330 stars have been amassed at a resolution of R=7500 in the Ca-triplet region of 8410-8795\AA. Wavelength coverage and resolution are thus comparable to that anticipated from the Gaia RVS. Derived data products of RAVE include radial velocities, stellar parameters, chemicals abundances for Mg, Al, Si, Ca, Ti, Fe, and Ni, and absorption measures based on the diffuse interstellar bands (DIB) at 8620\AA. Since more than 290000 RAVE targets are drawn from the Tycho-2 catalogue, RAVE will be an interesting prototype for the anticipated full Gaia data releases, in particular when combined with the early Gaia data releases, which contain astrometry but not yet stellar parameters and abundances.