We turn our attention to Haffner 9, a Milky Way open cluster whose previous fundamental parameter estimates are far from being in agreement. In order to provide with accurate estimates, we present high-quality Washington CT_1_ and Johnson BVI photometry of the cluster field. We put particular care in statistically cleaning the colour-magnitude diagrams (CMDs) from field star contamination, which was found a common source in previous works for the discordant fundamental parameter estimates. The resulting cluster CMD fiducial features were confirmed from a proper motion membership analysis. Haffner 9 is a moderately young object (age~350Myr), placed in the Perseus arm - at a heliocentric distance of ~3.2kpc - , with a lower limit for its present mass of ~160M_{sun}_ and of nearly metal solar content. The combination of the cluster structural and fundamental parameters suggest that it is in an advanced stage of internal dynamical evolution, possibly in the phase typical of those with mass segregation in their core regions. However, the cluster still keeps its mass function close to that of the Salpeter's law.
We present broad-band UBV(RI)_c_ CCD imagery of 334 stars in the direction of the Galactic cluster Haffner 19. The sample is complete to m{lambda}=19 ({lambda} = U, B, V, R, I). We reliably establish the cluster membership for 102 stars based upon their locations in the (V, B-V), (V, V-I), (I, R-I), (U-B, B-V), and (V-R, V-I) diagrams, thus increasing three-fold the number of known cluster members. With the Q-method we determine the MK spectral types of the 33 brightest stars, confirming that 29 belong to the cluster's young population (15 B0-B1 and 14 B2- B9 main sequence stars). Complementary uvby{beta} photoelectric photometry of 6 bright stars independently confirms the distance and reddening to the cluster.
Radial mass-to-light ratio gradients cause the half-mass and half-light radii of galaxies to differ, potentially biasing studies that use half-light radii. Here we present the largest catalog to date of galaxy half-mass radii at z>1: 7006 galaxies in the CANDELS fields at 1.0<=z<=2.5. The sample includes both star-forming and quiescent galaxies with stellar masses 9.0<=log(M_*_/M_{sun}_)<=11.5. We test three methods for calculating half-mass radii from multiband PSF-matched Hubble Space Telescope (HST) imaging: two based on spatially resolved spectral energy distribution modeling, and one that uses a rest-frame color profile. All three methods agree, with scatter <~0.3dex. In agreement with previous studies, most galaxies in our sample have negative color gradients (the centers are redder than the outskirts, and r_e,mass_<r_e,light_). We find that color gradient strength has significant trends with increasing stellar mass, half-light radius, U-V color, and stellar mass surface density. These trends have not been seen before at z>1. Furthermore, color gradients of star-forming and quiescent galaxies show a similar redshift evolution: they are flat at z>~2, then steeply decrease as redshift decreases. This affects the galaxy mass-size relation. The normalizations of the star-forming and quiescent r_mass_-M_*_ relations are 10%-40% smaller than the corresponding r_light_-M_*_ relations; the slopes are ~0.1-0.3dex shallower. Finally, the half-mass radii of star-forming and quiescent galaxies at M_*_=10^10.5^M_{sun}_ only grow by ~1% and ~8% between z~2.25 and z~1.25. This is significantly less than the ~37% and ~47% size increases found when using the half-light radius.
We present the results of an analysis of 107 extremely metal-poor (EMP) stars with metallicities lower than [Fe/H]=-3.0, identified in medium-resolution spectra in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). Our analysis provides estimates of the stellar effective temperatures and surface gravities, as well as iron, calcium, and magnesium abundances. We followed the same method as in previous papers of this series. The method is based on comparisons of the observed spectra with synthetic spectra. The abundances of Fe, Ca, and Mg were determined by fitting spectral regions that are dominated by lines of each element. In addition, we present a technique to determine upper limits for elements whose features are not detected in a given spectrum. We also analyzed our sample with the SEGUE stellar parameter pipeline to obtain additional determinations of the atmospheric parameters and iron and alpha-element abundances, which we then compare with ours. In addition, we used these parameters to infer [C/Fe] ratios. Ca is typically the only element in these spectra with a moderate to low signal-to-noise ratio and medium resolution in this metallicity regime with lines that are sufficiently strong to reliably measure its abundance. Fe and Mg exhibit weaker features that in most cases only provide upper limits. We measured [Ca/Fe] and [Mg/Fe] for EMP stars in the SDSS spectra and conclude that most of the stars exhibit the typical enhancement level for alpha-elements, ~+0.4, although some stars for which only [Fe/H] upper limits could be estimated indicate higher [alpha/Fe] ratios. We also find that 26% of the stars in our sample can be classified as carbon-enhanced metal-poor (CEMP) stars and that the frequency of CEMP stars also increases with decreasing metallicity, as has been reported for previous samples. We identify a rare, bright (g=11.90) EMP star, SDSS J134144.61+474128.6, with [Fe/H]=-3.27, [C/Fe]=+0.95, and elevated magnesium ([Mg/Fe]=+0.62), an abundance pattern typical of CEMP-no stars.
We present a spectroscopic search for halo field stars that originally formed in globular clusters. Using moderate-resolution SDSS-III/SEGUE-2 spectra of 561 red giants with typical halo metallicities (-1.8<=[Fe/H]<=-1.0), we identify 16 stars, 3% of the sample, with CN and CH bandstrength behavior indicating depleted carbon and enhanced nitrogen abundances relative to the rest of the data set. Since globular clusters are the only environment known in which stars form with this pattern of atypical light-element abundances, we claim that these stars are second-generation globular cluster stars that have been lost to the halo field via normal cluster mass-loss processes.
Updated uvby observations for a larger sample of metal-deficient red giants are presented and combined with a select sample of data from the literature transformed to a common system. Using the reddening maps of Burstein & Heiles [AJ, 87, 1165 (1982)], new absolute magnitudes, distances, metallicities, and reddenings are derived for each star. The metallicities are determined with a revised calibration of the m1, (b-y) diagram based upon comparison to a compilation of recent spectroscopic abundances transformed to a common system. The photometric abundances agree very well with the spectroscopic; the dispersion among the residuals for 58 giants is +/-0.16dex. The dereddened indices are used to show that for red giants with [Fe/H]<-1.5, there is a well-defined relation in the c0, (b-y)0 diagram which exhibits only a weak dependence upon metallicity. Use of the standard relations allows one to obtain reddening estimates for normal halo field giants and globular clusters in the appropriate metallicity range.
We have detected stellar halo streams in the solar neighborhood using data from the seventh public data release of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), which includes the directed stellar program Sloan Extension For Galactic Understanding and Exploration (SEGUE). In order to derive distances to each star, we used the metallicity-dependent photometric parallax relation from Ivezic et al. (2008ApJ...684..287I). Our final sample consists of 22321 nearby (d<=2kpc), metal-poor ([Fe/H]<=-0.5) main-sequence stars with six-dimensional estimates of position and space velocity (r{vec},{nu}{vec}). We characterize the orbits of these stars through suitable kinematic proxies for their "effective" integrals of motion, angular momentum, eccentricity, and orbital polar angle and compare the observed distribution to expectations from a smooth distribution in four [Fe/H] bins. The metallicities provide an additional dimension in parameter space that is well suited to distinguish tidal streams from those of dynamical origin. On this basis, we identify at least five significant "phase-space overdensities" of stars on very similar orbits in the solar neighborhood to which we can assign unambiguously peaked [Fe/H] distributions. Three of them have been identified previously, including the halo stream discovered by Helmi et al. (1999MNRAS.307..495H) at a significance level of {sigma}=12.0. In addition, we find at least two new genuine halo streams, judged by their kinematics and [Fe/H], at {sigma}=2.9 and 4.8, respectively.
We present new H{alpha} photometry for the Star Formation Reference Survey (SFRS), a representative sample of star-forming galaxies in the local Universe. Combining these data with the panchromatic coverage of the SFRS, we provide calibrations of H{alpha}-based star-formation rates (SFRs) with and without correction for the contribution of [NII] emission. We consider the effect of extinction corrections based on the Balmer decrement, infrared excess, and spectral energy distribution (SED) fits. We compare the SFR estimates derived from SED fits, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, hybrid indicators such as 24um+H{alpha}, 8um+H{alpha}, FIR+FUV, and H{alpha} emission for a sample of purely star-forming galaxies. We provide a new calibration for 1.4GHz-based SFRs by comparing to the H{alpha} emission, and we measure a dependence of the radio-to-H{alpha} emission ratio based on galaxy stellar mass. Active galactic nuclei introduce biases in the calibrations of different SFR indicators but have only a minimal effect on the inferred SFR densities from galaxy surveys. Finally, we quantify the correlation between galaxy metallicity and extinction.
We consider the effects of non-constant star formation histories (SFHs) on H{alpha} and GALEX far-ultraviolet (FUV) star formation rate (SFR) indicators. Under the assumption of a fully populated Chabrier initial mass function (IMF), we compare the distribution of H{alpha}-to-FUV flux ratios from ~1500 simple, periodic model SFHs with observations of 185 galaxies from the Spitzer Local Volume Legacy survey. We find a set of SFH models that are well matched to the data, such that more massive galaxies are best characterized by nearly constant SFHs, while low-mass systems experience burst amplitudes of ~30 (i.e., an increase in the SFR by a factor of 30 over the SFR during the inter-burst period), burst durations of tens of Myr, and periods of ~250 Myr; these SFHs are broadly consistent with the increased stochastic star formation expected in systems with lower SFRs. We analyze the predicted temporal evolution of galaxy stellar mass, R-band surface brightness, H{alpha}-derived SFR, and blue luminosity, and find that they provide a reasonable match to observed flux distributions. We find that our model SFHs are generally able to reproduce both the observed systematic decline and increased scatter in H{alpha}-to-FUV ratios toward low-mass systems, without invoking other physical mechanisms.
Using a complete sample of ~300 star-forming galaxies within 11Mpc of the Milky Way, we evaluate the consistency between star formation rates (SFRs) inferred from the far ultraviolet (FUV) non-ionizing continuum and H{alpha} nebular emission, assuming standard conversion recipes in which the SFR scales linearly with luminosity at a given wavelength. Our analysis probes SFRs over 5 orders of magnitude, down to ultra-low activities on the order of ~10^-4^M_{sun}_/yr. The data are drawn from the 11Mpc H{alpha} and Ultraviolet Galaxy Survey (11HUGS), which has obtained H{alpha} fluxes from ground-based narrowband imaging, and UV fluxes from imaging with GALEX.
