The Stars of the HETDEX Survey. I. Radial Velocities and Metal-Poor Stars from Low-Resolution Stellar Spectra

Abstract

The Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX) is an unbiased, massively multiplexed spectroscopic survey, designed to measure the expansion history of the universe through low-resolution ($R\sim 750$) spectra of Lyman-Alpha Emitters. In its search for these galaxies, HETDEX will also observe a few 10${}^5$ stars. In this paper, we present the first stellar value-added catalog within the internal second data release of the HETDEX Survey (HDR2). The new catalog contains 120,571 low-resolution spectra for 98,736 unique stars between $10<G<22$ spread across the HETDEX footprint at relatively high ($b\sim 60^{\circ }$) Galactic latitudes. With these spectra, we measure radial velocities (RVs) for $\sim$42,000 unique FGK-type stars in the catalog and show that the HETDEX spectra are sufficient to constrain these RVs with a 1$\ddot{I}ƒ$ precision of 28.0 km/s and bias of 3.5 km/s with respect to the LAMOST surveys and 1$\ddot{I}ƒ$ precision of 27.5 km/s and bias of 14.0 km/s compared to the SEGUE survey. Since these RVs are for faint ($G\ge 16$) stars, they will be complementary to Gaia. Using t-Distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (t-SNE), we also demonstrate that the HETDEX spectra can be used to determine a star's T$\mathrm{eff}$, and log g and its [Fe/H]. With the t-SNE projection of the FGK-type stars with HETDEX spectra we also identify 416 new candidate metal-poor ([Fe/H] $<-1$~dex) stars for future study. These encouraging results illustrate the utility of future low-resolution stellar spectroscopic surveys.

18 Pages, 11 Figures, 2 Tables. Accepted to ApJ