Description
To explore the complex halo substructure that has been reported in the direction of the Virgo constellation, radial velocities and metallicities have been measured for 82 RR Lyrae stars (RRLS) that were identified by the QUEST survey. These stars are distributed over 90 sq. deg. of the sky, and lie from 4 to 23kpc from the Sun. Using an algorithm for finding groups in phase space and modeling the smooth halo component in the region, we identified the 5 most significant RRLS groups, some of which were previously known or suspected. We have examined the SEKBO and the Catalina catalog of RRLS (with available spectroscopic measurements), as well as the bright QUEST RRLS sample, the catalog of Red Giant stars from the Spaghetti survey, and three recent catalogs of blue horizontal branch (BHB) stars, for stars that may be related to the QUEST RRLS groups.
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