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RRLFE: software for generating and applying metallicity calibrations for RR Lyrae variable stars across a wide range of phases and temperatures

  • Eckhart Spalding
  • , Ronald Wilhelm
  • , Nathan De Lee
  • , Stacy Long
  • , Timothy C. Beers
  • , Vinicius M. Placco
  • , John Kielkopf
  • , Young Sun Lee
  • , Joshua Pepper
  • , Kenneth Carrell

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

RR Lyrae stars play a central role in tracing phase-space structures within the Milky Way because they are easy to identify, are relatively luminous, and are found in large numbers in the Galactic bulge, disc, and halo. In this work, we present a new set of spectroscopic metallicity calibrations that use the equivalent widths of the Ca II K and Balmer H γ and H δ lines to calculate metallicity values from low-resolution spectra. This builds on an earlier calibration from Layden by extending the range of equivalent widths which map between Ca II K and the Balmer lines. We have developed the software RRLFE to apply this calibration to spectra in a consistent, reproducible, and extensible manner. This software is open-source and available to the community. The calibration can be updated with additional data sets in the future.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)828-845
Number of pages18
JournalMonthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
Volume527
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - Jan 1 2024

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 The Author(s).

Funding

ES acknowledges support from Huffaker Travel Scholarships, and department Chair Sumit Das for providing additional travel funding, under the auspices of the University of Kentucky Physics and Astronomy Department. TCB acknowledges partial support for this work from grant PHY 14-30152; Physics Frontier Center/Joint Institute for Nuclear Astrophysics Center for the Evolution of the Elements (JINA-CEE), awarded by the U.S. National Science Foundation. The work of VMP is supported by the National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory (NOIRLab), which is managed by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy (AURA) under a cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation. YSL acknowledges support from the National Research Foundation (NRF) of Korea grant funded by the Ministry of Science and Information and Communication Technology (ICT) (NRF-2021R1A2C1008679). YSL also gratefully acknowledges partial support for his visit to the University of Notre Dame from OISE-1927130: The International Research Network for Nuclear Astrophysics (IReNA), awarded by the US National Science Foundation. We also acknowledge Rhodes Hart, who obtained a light curve for one of our programme stars from Mt. Kent Observatory in Australia, which is administered by the University of Southern Queensland. This paper includes data collected by the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) mission, which are publicly available from the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST). Funding for the TESS mission is provided by NASA’s Science Mission directorate. This research has also made use of the Set of Identifications, Measurements and Bibliography for Astronomical Data (SIMBAD) data base, operated at the Centre de Données astronomiques de Strasbourg (CDS), Strasbourg, France (Wenger et al. ). Funding for the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) and SDSS-II has been provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Participating Institutions, the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Japanese Monbukagakusho, the Max Planck Society, and the Higher Education Funding Council for England. The SDSS Web Site is http://www.sdss.org/ . This paper also makes use of data from the Kilodegree Extremely Little Telescope (KELT) (DOI 10.26133/NEA8). Early work on KELT-North was supported by National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Grant NNG04GO70G. Work on KELT-North was partially supported by NSF Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) Grant AST-1056524 to S. Gaudi, and from the Vanderbilt Office of the Provost through the Vanderbilt Initiative in Data-intensive Astrophysics. This research was supported in part by the Notre Dame Center for Research Computing’s computing clusters. Some computations were also performed on CyVerse Atmosphere cyberinfrastructure, which is supported by the National Science Foundation under Award Numbers DBI-0735191 and DBI-1265383. Jeff Chilcote also kindly allowed the use of his PLANETFINDER cluster.

FundersFunder number
Ministry of Science and ICT, South Korea
NASA’s Science Mission
National Research Foundation of Korea
NSF's National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory
Physics Frontier Center/Joint Institute for Nuclear Astrophysics Center
Higher Education Funding Council for England
Fritz-Haber-Institut der Max-Planck-Gesellschaft
Vanderbilt Office of the Provost
U.S. Department of Energy
Alfred P Sloan Foundation
Notre Dame Center for Research Computing’s computing clusters
Sloan Digital Sky Survey
National Aeronautics and Space AdministrationNNG04GO70G
National Science Foundation Arctic Social Science ProgramDBI-1265383, 1056524, DBI-0735191, 0735191
Junta Nacional de Investigação Científica e TecnológicaNRF-2021R1A2C1008679, OISE-1927130
National Stroke FoundationAST-1056524
Kentucky Physics and Astronomy DepartmentPHY 14-30152

    Keywords

    • RR Lyrae – Galaxy
    • halo
    • public release – stars
    • spectroscopic – software
    • techniques
    • variables

    ASJC Scopus subject areas

    • Astronomy and Astrophysics
    • Space and Planetary Science

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