The selection function of the RAVE survey

Abstract

We characterize the selection function of RAVE using 2MASS as our underlying population, which we assume represents all stars which could have potentially been observed. We evaluate the completeness fraction as a function of position, magnitude, and color in two ways: first, on a field-by-field basis, and second, in equal-size areas on the sky. Then, we consider the effect of the RAVE stellar parameter pipeline on the final resulting catalogue, which in principle limits the parameter space over which our selection function is valid. Our final selection function is the product of the completeness fraction and the selection function of the pipeline. We then test if the application of the selection function introduces biases in the derived parameters. To do this, we compare a parent mock catalogue generated using Galaxia with a mock-RAVE catalogue where the selection function of RAVE has been applied. We conclude that for stars brighter than I = 12, between $4000\mathrm{K}<{\mathrm{T}}_{\mathrm{eff}}<8000\mathrm{K}$ and $0.5<\log \mathrm{g}<5.0$, RAVE is kinematically and chemically unbiased with respect to expectations from Galaxia.

14 pages, 12 figures, accepted for publication in MNRAS

References in corpus (13)

• The Gaia mission
• Gaia Data Release 1. Summary of the astrometric, photometric, and survey properties
• The Radial Velocity Experiment (RAVE): first data release
• The Radial Velocity Experiment (RAVE): Fifth Data Release
• The Radial Velocity Experiment (RAVE): second data release
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• The Tycho-Gaia astrometric solution. How to get 2.5 million parallaxes with less than one year of Gaia data
• APASS Landolt-Sloan BVgri photometry of RAVE stars. I. Data, effective temperatures and reddenings
• Kinematic modelling of the Milky Way using the RAVE and GCS stellar surveys
• Weighing the local dark matter with RAVE red clump stars
• Estimation of the Tilt of the Stellar Velocity Ellipsoid from RAVE and Implications for Mass Models
• Galactic kinematics with RAVE data: I. The distribution of stars towards the Galactic poles
• The Gaia-ESO Survey: the selection function of the Milky Way field stars

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• Very metal-poor stars observed by the RAVE survey
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• The GALAH Survey: Stellar streams and how stellar velocity distributions vary with Galactic longitude, hemisphere and metallicity
• The Metal-Poor Stellar Halo in RAVE-TGAS and its Implications for the Velocity Distribution of Dark Matter
• Chemical Cartography. II. The Assembly History of the Galactic Stellar Halo Traced by Carbon-Enhanced Metal-Poor Stars
• Effects of the selection function on metallicity trends in spectroscopic surveys of the Milky Way
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• Climbing the cosmic ladder with stellar twins in RAVE with Gaia
• The vertical metallicity gradients of mono-age stellar populations in the Milky Way with the RAVE and Gaia data
• Insights into the Formation and Evolution History of the Galactic Disk System
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• Local Stellar Kinematics from RAVE data -- VIII. Effects of the Galactic Disc Perturbations on Stellar Orbits of Red Clump Stars
• seestar: Selection functions for spectroscopic surveys of the Milky Way
• Rediscovering the Milky Way with orbit superposition approach and APOGEE data I. Method validation
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• Local disc model in view of Gaia DR1 and RAVE data
• Self-consistent Modelling of the Milky Way using Gaia data
• Galactic Archeology with RAVE and TGAS