The Sixth Data Release of the Radial Velocity Experiment (RAVE). II. Stellar Atmospheric Parameters, Chemical Abundances, and Distances

Abstract

We present part 2 of the sixth and final Data Release (DR6) of the Radial Velocity Experiment (RAVE), a magnitude-limited ( $9\lt I\lt 12$ ) spectroscopic survey of Galactic stars randomly selected in Earth's southern hemisphere. The RAVE medium-resolution spectra (R ˜ 7500) cover the Ca triplet region (8410-8795 Å) and span the complete time frame from the start of RAVE observations on 2003 April 12 to their completion on 2013 April 4. In the second of two publications, we present the data products derived from 518,387 observations of 451,783 unique stars using a suite of advanced reduction pipelines focusing on stellar atmospheric parameters, in particular purely spectroscopically derived stellar atmospheric parameters ( ${T}_{\mathrm{eff}}$ , $\mathrm{log}g$ , and the overall metallicity), enhanced stellar atmospheric parameters inferred via a Bayesian pipeline using Gaia DR2 astrometric priors, and asteroseismically calibrated stellar atmospheric parameters for giant stars based on asteroseismic observations for 699 K2 stars. In addition, we provide abundances of the elements Fe, Al, and Ni, as well as an overall [α/Fe] ratio obtained using a new pipeline based on the GAUGUIN optimization method that is able to deal with variable signal-to-noise ratios. The RAVE DR6 catalogs are cross-matched with relevant astrometric and photometric catalogs, and are complemented by orbital parameters and effective temperatures based on the infrared flux method. The data can be accessed via the RAVE website (http://rave-survey.org) or the Vizier database.