A Blueprint for the Milky Way's Stellar Populations. II. Improved Isochrone Calibration in the SDSS and Pan-STARRS Photometric Systems

TL;DR

This paper refines stellar isochrone calibrations in SDSS and Pan-STARRS systems using Gaia data, enabling better identification of Galactic halo populations and revealing detailed structures and metallicity distributions.

Contribution

It provides improved empirically calibrated isochrones based on Gaia data, enhancing the analysis of stellar populations in the Milky Way's halo.

Findings

Identification of distinct stellar populations in the halo based on metallicity and kinematics.

Confirmation of separate prograde and retrograde groups among the most metal-poor stars.

Quantitative characterization of the proportions of different halo components at 4-6 kpc from the Galactic plane.

Abstract

We improve the identification and isolation of individual stellar populations in the Galactic halo based on an updated set of empirically calibrated stellar isochrones in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) and Pan-STARRS 1 (PS1) photometric systems. Along the Galactic prime meridian ($l=0^{\circ}$ and $180^{\circ}$), where proper motions and parallaxes from Gaia DR2 can be used to compute rotational velocities of stars in the rest frame of the Milky Way, we use the observed double color-magnitude sequences of stars having large transverse motions, which are attributed to groups of stars in the metal-poor halo and the thick disk with halo-like kinematics, respectively. The Gaia sequences directly constrain color-magnitude relations of model colors, and help to improve our previous calibration using Galactic star clusters. Based on these updated sets of stellar isochrones, we confirm earlier results on the presence of distinct groups of stars in the metallicity versus rotational-velocity plane, and find that the distribution of the most metal-poor ([Fe/H] $<-2$) stars in our sample can be modeled using two separate groups on prograde and retrograde orbits, respectively. At $4$-$6$ kpc from the Galactic plane, we find approximately equal proportions of the Splashed Disk, and the metal-rich ($\langle {\rm [Fe/H]} \rangle\sim-1.6$) and metal-poor ($\langle {\rm [Fe/H]} \rangle\sim-2.5$) halos on prograde orbits. The Gaia-Sausage-Enceladus, the metal-weak thick disk, and the retrograde halo structure(s) ($\langle {\rm [Fe/H]} \rangle\sim-2.2$) constitute approximately $10\%$ of the rest of the stellar populations at these distances.