Calibration of RAVE distances to a large sample of Hipparcos stars

Abstract

A magnitude limited population of 18 808 Hipparcos stars is used to calibrate distances for 52 794 RAVE stars, including dwarfs, giants, and pre-main sequence stars. I give treatments for a number of types of bias affecting calculation, including bias from the non-linear relationship between the quantity of interest (e.g., distance or distance modulus) and the measured quantity (parallax or visual magnitude), the Lutz-Kelker bias, and bias due to variation in density of the stellar population. The use of a magnitude bound minimises the Malmquist and the Lutz-Kelker bias, and avoids a measurement bias resulting from the greater accuracy of Hipparcos parallaxes for brighter stars. The calibration is applicable to stars in 2MASS when there is some way to determine stellar class with reasonable confidence. For RAVE this is possible for hot dwarfs and using $\log g$. The accuracy of the calibration is tested against Hipparcos stars with better than 2% parallax errors, and by comparison of the RAVE velocity distribution with that of Hipparcos, and is found to improve upon previous estimates of luminosity distance. An estimate of the LSR from RAVE data, (U_{0}, V_{0}, W_{0}) = (14.9 \pm 1.7, 15.3 \pm 0.4, 6.9 \pm 0.1) km\,s^{-1} shows excellent agreement with the current best estimate from XHIP. The RAVE velocity distribution confirms the alignment of stellar motions with spiral structure.

Accepted by MNRAS

References in corpus (4)

• The Geneva-Copenhagen Survey of the Solar neighbourhood II. New uvby calibrations and rediscussion of stellar ages, the G dwarf problem, age-metallicity diagram, and heating mechanisms of the disk
• The Radial Velocity Experiment (RAVE): second data release
• Calculation of the Local Standard of Rest from 20,574 Local Stars in the New Hipparcos Reduction with Known Radial Velocities
• Luminosity-Colours relations for thin disc main-sequence stars

Cited by in corpus (12)

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• A Volume-Limited Survey of mCP Stars Within 100pc I: Fundamental Parameters and Chemical Abundances
• Two estimates of the distance to the Galactic centre
• Parallax of Galactic Cepheids from Spatially Scanning the Wide Field Camera 3 on the Hubble Space Telescope: The Case of SS Canis Majoris
• Characterizing the High-Velocity Stars of RAVE: The Discovery of a Metal-Rich Halo Star Born in the Galactic Disk
• The K2-ESPRINT Project V: a short-period giant planet orbiting a subgiant star
• The Gaia-ESO Survey: the selection function of the Milky Way field stars
• The local stellar luminosity function and mass-to-light ratio in the NIR
• The local standard of rest and the well in the velocity distribution
• The Lutz-Kelker Paradox
• New Radial Velocities for 30 Candidate Runaway Stars and a Possible Binary Supernova Origin for HIP 9470 and PSR J0152-1637
• Inference from modelling the chemodynamical evolution of the Milky Way disc