SEMINAR ANNOUNCEMENT: OAT-DAUT Seminar on Wednesday March 19th at 12:00 (noon) - Villa Bazzoni

[Gabriella Schiulaz]

I announce you this week seminar:

*********************************************************** 
               OATS-DAUT SEMINAR 
*********************************************************** 

Speaker: Tomaz Zwitter (Univ. of Ljubljana) 

Title: Present state and promises of the RAVE survey 

Date: Wednesday, March 19th, 2008 
Time: 12:00 
Venue: Villa Bazzoni (via Bazzoni, 2)

*********************************************************** 
Abstract: The growing awareness of the importance of the 'fossil record' in the Milky Way Galaxy in constraining galaxy formation theory is reflected by the increasing number of missions designed to unravel the formation history of the Galaxy. Stellar spectroscopy plays a crucial role in these studies, not only providing radial velocities as a key component of the 6-dimensional phase space of stellar positions and velocities, but also providing much-needed information on the gravity and chemical composition of individual stars. I will present the RAdial Velocity Experiment (RAVE), an ambitious spectroscopic survey which already secured over a quarter million stellar spectra with a promise of quadrupling the sample in the next few years. For many of these spectra not only the radial velocity but also stellar parameters have been determined from spectral analysis. This requires automated reduction, analysis and classification techniques which had to be checked against other spectroscopic and photometric datasets. The adopted solutions are important for planning of future large scale spectroscopic surveys and also for any RAVE user who wants to take full advantage of the claimed rather impressive typical errors: less than 2 km/s error in radial velocity, 400 K in temperature, 0.5 dex in gravity and 0.2 dex in metallicity. The talk will present the first two data releases (Steinmetz et al. 2006, Zwitter et al. 2008) and summarize the scientific results already obtained. 
*********************************************************** 
contact: Paolo Molaro (OATS) 



For additional information on OAT seminars see:
http://adlibitum.oats.inaf.it/seminari/ 

Gabriella Schiulaz
segreteria OAT
Phone: 040-3199241
schiulaz at oats.inaf.it
segreteria at oats.inaf.it