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Description
The Milky Way's metal-poor stars are nearby ancient objects that are used to study early chemical evolution and the assembly and structure of the Milky Way. Here we present reliable metallicities of ~280000 stars with -3.75<~[Fe/H]<~-0.75 down to g=17 derived using metallicity-sensitive photometry from the second data release of the SkyMapper Southern Survey. We use the dependency of the flux through the SkyMapper v filter on the strength of the CaII K absorption features, in tandem with SkyMapper u, g, i photometry, to derive photometric metallicities for these stars. We find that metallicities derived in this way compare well to metallicities derived in large-scale spectroscopic surveys, and we use such comparisons to calibrate and quantify systematics as a function of location, reddening, and color. We find good agreement with metallicities from the APOGEE, LAMOST, and GALAH surveys, based on a standard deviation of {sigma}~0.25dex of the residuals of our photometric metallicities with respect to metallicities from those surveys. We also compare our derived photometric metallicities to metallicities presented in a number of high-resolution spectroscopic studies to validate the low-metallicity end ([Fe/H]{<}-2.5) of our photometric metallicity determinations. In such comparisons, we find the metallicities of stars with photometric [Fe/H]{<}-2.5 in our catalog show no significant offset and a scatter of {sigma}~0.31dex level relative to those in high-resolution work when considering the cooler stars (g-i>0.65) in our sample. We also present an expanded catalog containing photometric metallicities of ~720000 stars as a data table for further exploration of the metal-poor Milky Way.
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