For a sample of metal-poor stars (-3.3 ≤ [Fe/H] ≤-2.2) that have highresolution spectroscopic abundance determinations, we have measured equivalent widths of the Ca II K, Mg I b and near-infrared Ca II triplet lines using low-resolution spectra from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), calculated effective temperatures from (g - z)o color, deduced stellar surface gravities by fitting stellar isochrones, and determined metallicities based on the aforementioned quantities. Metallicities thus derived from the Ca II K line are in much better agreement with the results deter- mined from high-resolution spectra than the values given in the SDSS Data Release 7. The metallicities derived from the Mg I b lines have a large dispersion owing to the large measurement errors, whereas those deduced from the Ca II triplet lines are too high due to both non-local thermodynamical equilibrium (NLTE) effects and mea- surement errors. Abundances after correction for the NLTE effect for the Mg I b lines and Ca II triplet lines are also presented. Following this method, we have identified six candidates of ultra-metal-poor stars with [Fe/H] - -4.0 from a sample of 166 metal-poor star candidates. One of them, SDSS J102915+172927, was recently con- firmed to be an ultra-metal-poor ([Fe/H] 〈 -4.0) star with the lowest metallicity ever measured. Follow-up high-resolution spectroscopy for the other five ultra-metal-poor stars in our sample will therefore be of great interest.
The stellar halo is one of the major components in the Milky Way. Research on its age can provide critical constraints on the origin of the stellar halo and further on the formation of our Galaxy.So far, different approaches and samples have been used to estimate the age of the Galactic halo. In our previous paper, we carefully selected 63 field halo turn-off stars within 1 kpc from the literature using a kinematic approach, then estimated the age of the halo. In this following work, we not only update the data from LAMOST DR4 and Gaia DR1, but also try a different method to select a clean halo sample by combining the metallicity and orbital parameters. Then we compare this halo turn-off sample with the GARSTEC model in the B-V vs. metallicity plane. After Monte Carlo simulations are performed, the age is estimated to be 10.5±1.4 Gyr, highly consistent with our previous result and other studies. However,due to the limited common sources between LAMOST DR4 and Gaia DR1, the final sample in this paper is still quite small. The estimated age will be more robust with the much larger Gaia DR2.
The Xuyi Schmidt Telescope Photometric Survey of the Galactic Anti-center(XSTPS-GAC)is a photometric sky survey that covers nearly 6000 deg^2 towards the Galactic Anti-center(GAC) in the g,r,i bands. Half of its survey field is located on the Galactic Anti-center disk,which makes XSTPSGAC highly suitable to search for new open clusters in the GAC region. In this paper,we report new open cluster candidates discovered in this survey,as well as properties of these open cluster candidates,such as age,distance and reddening,derived by isochrone fitting in the color-magnitude diagram(CMD).These open cluster candidates are stellar density peaks detected in the star density maps by applying the method from Koposov et al. Each candidate is inspected in terms of its true color image composed from three XSTPS-GAC band images. Then its CMD is checked,in order to identify whether the central region stars have a clear isochrone-like trend differing from background stars. The parameters derived from isochrone fitting for these candidates are mainly based on three band photometry of XSTPS-GAC.Moreover,when these new candidates are able to be seen clearly in 2 MASS data,their parameters are also derived based on the 2 MASS(J-H,J) CMD. There are a total of 320 known open clusters rediscovered and 24 new open cluster candidates discovered in this work. Furthermore,the parameters of these new candidates,as well as another 11 previously known open clusters,are properly determined for the first time.
Research about asteroids has recently attracted more and more attention, especially focusing on their physical structures, such as their spin axis, rotation period and shape. The long distance between observers on Earth and asteroids makes it impossible to directly calculate the shape and other parameters of asteroids, with the exception of Near Earth Asteroids and others that have passed by some spacecrafts. Photometric measurements are still generally the main way to obtain research data on asteroids, i.e. the lightcurves recording the brightness and positions of asteroids. Supposing that the shape of the asteroid is a triaxial ellipsoid with a stable spin, a new method is presented in this article to reconstruct the shape models of asteroids from the lightcurves, together with other physical parameters. By applying a special curvature function, the method calculates the brightness integration on a unit sphere and Lebedev quadrature is employed for the discretization. Finally, the method searches for the optimal solution by the Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm to minimize the residual of the brightness. By adopting this method, not only can related physical parameters of asteroids be obtained at a reasonable accuracy, but also a simple shape model of an ellipsoid can be generated for reconstructing a more sophisticated shape model.