Milky Way L/T/M-dwarfs identified in BoRG survey

DOI

We present a tally of Milky Way late-type dwarf stars in 68 Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) pure-parallel fields (227 arcmin^2^) from the Brightest of Reionizing Galaxies survey for high-redshift galaxies. Using spectroscopically identified M-dwarfs in two public surveys, the Cosmic Assembly Near-IR Deep Extragalactic Legacy Survey and the Early Release Science mosaics, we identify a morphological selection criterion using the half-light radius (r_50_), a near-infrared J-H, G-J color region where M-dwarfs are found, and a V-J relation with M-dwarf subtype. We apply this morphological selection of stellar objects, color-color selection of M-dwarfs, and optical-near-infrared color subtyping to compile a catalog of 274 M-dwarfs belonging to the disk of the Milky Way with a limiting magnitude of m_F125W_<24(AB). Based on the M-dwarf statistics, we conclude that (1) the previously identified north-south discrepancy in M-dwarf numbers persists in our sample; there are more M-dwarfs in the northern fields on average than in southern ones, (2) the Milky Way's single disk scale-height for M-dwarfs is 0.3-4 kpc, depending on subtype, (3) the scale-height depends on M-dwarf subtype with early types (M0-4) high scale-height (z_0_=3-4 kpc) and later types M5 and above in the thin disk (z_0_=0.3-0.5 kpc), (4) a second component is visible in the vertical distribution, with a different, much higher scale-height in the southern fields compared to the northern ones. We report the M-dwarf component of the Sagittarius stream in one of our fields with 11 confirmed M-dwarfs, seven of which are at the stream's distance. In addition to the M-dwarf catalog, we report the discovery of 1 T-dwarfs and 30 L-dwarfs from their near-infrared colors. The dwarf scale-height and the relative low incidence in our fields of L- and T-dwarfs in these fields makes it unlikely that these stars will be interlopers in great numbers in color-selected samples of high-redshift galaxies. The relative ubiquity of M-dwarfs however will make them ideal tracers of Galactic halo substructure with EUCLID and reference stars for James Webb Space Telescope observations.

Cone search capability for table J/ApJ/788/77/table5 (The M-dwarfs Identified by PEARS in the ERS Mosaic)

Cone search capability for table J/ApJ/788/77/dwarfs (L (table14), T (table15), M (table16) dwarfs identified in BoRG)

Cone search capability for table J/ApJ/788/77/table4 (The M-dwarfs Identified by PEARS in the CANDELS Field)

Identifier
DOI http://doi.org/10.26093/cds/vizier.17880077
Source https://dc.g-vo.org/rr/q/lp/custom/CDS.VizieR/J/ApJ/788/77
Related Identifier https://cdsarc.cds.unistra.fr/viz-bin/cat/J/ApJ/788/77
Related Identifier http://vizier.cds.unistra.fr/viz-bin/VizieR-2?-source=J/ApJ/788/77
Metadata Access http://dc.g-vo.org/rr/q/pmh/pubreg.xml?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_b2find&identifier=ivo://CDS.VizieR/J/ApJ/788/77
Provenance
Creator Holwerda B.W.; Trenti M.; Clarkson W.; Sahu K.; Bradley L.; Stiavelli M.,Pirzkal N.; De Marchi G.; Andersen M.; Bouwens R.; Ryan R.
Publisher CDS
Publication Year 2017
Rights https://cds.unistra.fr/vizier-org/licences_vizier.html
OpenAccess true
Contact CDS support team <cds-question(at)unistra.fr>
Representation
Resource Type Dataset; AstroObjects
Discipline Astrophysics and Astronomy; Galactic and extragalactic Astronomy; Natural Sciences; Observational Astronomy; Physics; Stellar Astronomy