LAMPSS: Discovery of Metal-Poor Stars in the Galactic Halo with the CaHK filter on CFHT MegaCam

Worrell, Eleanor and Patel, Niam and Wresilo, Karolina and Dicker, Sam and Bray, Olivia and Bagness, Jack and Sobral, David (2019) LAMPSS: Discovery of Metal-Poor Stars in the Galactic Halo with the CaHK filter on CFHT MegaCam. Notices of Lancaster Astrophysics (NLUAstro), 1. pp. 75-90.

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Abstract

We present the Lancaster Astrophysics Metal Poor Star Search (LAMPSS) in the Milky Way halo, conducted using the metallicity-sensitive Ca H & K lines. We use the CaHK filter of the MegaPrime/MegaCam on the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT) to survey an area of 1.010deg2 over the COSMOS field. We combine our new CaHK data with broadband optical and near-infrared photometry of COSMOS to recover stars down to mHK ∼ 26. After removing galaxies, we find 70% completion and 30% contamination for our remaining 1772 stars. By exploring a range of spectral types and metallicities, we derive metallicity-sensitive colour-colour diagrams which we use to isolate different spectral types and metallicities (−5 ≤ [Fe/H ≤ 0). From these, we identify 16 potentially extremely metal-poor stars. One of which, LAMPS 1229, we predict to have [Fe/H] ∼ −5.0 at a distance of (78.21 ± 9.37) kpc. We construct a Metallicity Distribution Function for our sample of metal-poor stars, finding an expected sharp decrease in count as [Fe/H] decreases.