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D. Geisler, J. Arenas, W. Gieren (Universidad de Concepcion), V. Smith (University of Texas at El Paso), S. Majewski (University of Virginia)
We have recently begun a 3-year project to obtain followup photometry and spectroscopy of the grid giant star candidates that we are establishing as part of a SIM Preparatory Science program (Majewski PI). The initial program will establish several thousand metal-poor northern and southern hemisphere G-K giants as grid star candidates, based on single-epoch photometry and low resolution spectroscopy. Our privileged access to this database and to telescopes in both hemispheres allows us to obtain rapid and timely multi-epoch photometric and high resolution spectroscopic followup observations of these candidates. Such data are essential for verifying their photometric and radial velocity stability and thus guaranteeing their utility as grid stars. In addition, our observations will allow us to greatly improve our knowledge of the basic atmospheric parameters of these stars (surface temperature, gravity and metallicity). We will carry out a sensitive search for stellar and planetary companions and establish the binary frequency of these interesting stars for the first time. Finally, we will study their detailed chemical composition. Such a large-scale study of abundances in metal-poor giants should yield fascinating details of Galactic nucleosynthesis. We report here on our observing and reduction techniques and strategies and give an initial progress report.
We acknowledge funding of this research from NASA/JPL through grant number NRA-99-04-OSS-058.