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Milky Way Survey Catalog Of Blue Horizontal Branch Stars

Overview

This is a DESI DR1 release of blue horizontal branch (BHB) from the Milky Way Survey (MWS) working group.

The catalogue contains 6,327 spectroscopically selected BHB stars following the selection in Bystroem et al. (2024) (hereafter B24), applied to MWS year 1 data. The spectroscopic selection has been applied to stars targeted as BHB candidates (see Sec. 2.3 in B24), and removes stellar contaminants by making a selection in effective temperature and surface gravity (Eq. (5) and Fig. 1). The BHB absolute magnitudes have been calculated following Eq. (6).

Data Access

Data URL: https://data.desi.lbl.gov/public/dr1/vac/dr1/mws-bhb/v1.0/

NERSC access:

/global/cfs/cdirs/desi/public/dr1/vac/dr1/mws-bhb/v1.0/

Documentation

Files

  • MWS_BHB.fits: Main catalog file of BHB stars.

Data model

The BHB spectroscopic selection has been applied to the RVTAB, FIBERMAP and GAIA HDUs of the main file of the MWS VAC (mws-all-pix-iron.fits), and this VAC inherits the same file structure (minus the SCORES HDU). These three HDUs contain the outputs from the RVSpecfit pipeline (described in the MWS overview paper by Cooper et al. (2023) Sec. 6.1), DESI observational information, and a crossmatch with Gaia DR3, respectively. These HDUs have been described here (HDU1, HDU2 and HDU4, respectively).

Added to the FIBERMAP HDU are an additional five columns:

Name Type Units Description
MAG_DERED_G float32 mag dereddened Legacy Survey g magnitude
MAG_DERED_R float32 mag dereddened Legacy Survey r magnitude
MAG_DERED_Z float32 mag dereddened Legacy Survey z magnitude
ABS_MAG_G float64 mag absolute magnitude in the g-band calculated using Eq. (6) in B24
DIST float64 kpc heliocentric distance in kpc

Contact

Contact Amanda Byström with any questions.