Candidate Members of the VMP/EMP Disk System of the Galaxy from the SkyMapper and SAGES Surveys

TL;DR

This study identifies likely very metal-poor and extremely metal-poor stars as members of the Galactic disk using photometric surveys, revealing a significant primordial disk component in the Milky Way.

Contribution

It introduces a new method to identify VMP/EMP disk stars from SkyMapper and SAGES data, expanding understanding of the Galaxy's early disk formation.

Findings

Identified 1,496 VMP/EMP candidate disk stars with prograde orbits.

Most candidate stars have low orbital eccentricities, indicating a stable disk component.

Results suggest an early forming primordial disk in the Milky Way.

Abstract

Photometric stellar surveys now cover a large fraction of the sky, probe to fainter magnitudes than large-scale spectroscopic surveys, and are relatively free from the target-selection biases often associated with such studies. Photometric-metallicity estimates that include narrow/medium-band filters can achieve comparable accuracy and precision to existing low-resolution spectroscopic surveys such as SDSS/SEGUE and LAMOST. Here we report on an effort to identify likely members of the Galactic disk system among the very metal-poor (VMP; [Fe/H] $\leq$ --2) and extremely metal-poor (EMP; [Fe/H] $\leq$ --3) stars. Our analysis is based on an initial sample of $\sim11.5$ million stars with full space motions selected from the SkyMapper Southern Survey (SMSS) and Stellar Abundance and Galactic Evolution Survey (SAGES). After applying a number of quality cuts to obtain the best available metallicity and dynamical estimates, we analyze a total of $\sim$5.86 million stars in the combined SMSS/SAGES sample. We employ two techniques that, depending on the method, identify between 876 and 1,476 VMP stars (6.9%-11.7% of all VMP stars) and between 40 and 59 EMP stars (12.4%-18.3% of all EMP stars) that appear to be members of the Galactic disk system on highly prograde orbits (v$_{\phi} > 150$ km/s). The total number of candidate VMP/EMP disk-like stars is 1,496, the majority of which have low orbital eccentricities, ecc $\le 0.4$; many have ecc $\le 0.2$. The large fractions of VMP/EMP stars associated with the Milky Way disk system strongly suggest the presence of an early forming ``primordial" disk.