Identifying Contributions to the Stellar Halo from Accreted, Kicked-Out, and in Situ Populations (original) (raw)

We present a medium-resolution spectroscopic survey of late-type giant stars at mid-Galactic latitudes of (30 • < |b| <60 • ), designed to probe the properties of this population to distances of ∼9 kpc. There are two main goals of this survey. The first goal is to explore the kinematical properties of the thick disk. Since M giants are generally metal-rich and we have limited contamination from thin disk stars by the latitude selection, most of the stars in the survey are expected to be members of the thick disk (<[Fe/H]>∼-0.6) with little confusion from the -2metal-poor (<[Fe/H]>∼-1.6) halo. The second goal of the survey is to study the properties of the metal-rich component of the nearby halo, a Galactic population that is also represented in our sample.