Investigating the Milky Way with the RAVE chemical catalog

Abstract

RAVE is a large spectroscopic survey of the Milky Way, aiming at observing up to one million stars by 2012 and at obtaining radial velocities and atmosphere parameters (see Steinmetz et al. [6], Zwitter et al. [7], Siebert et al. [5]). Despite to their medium resolution (R ∼ 7500), and the small wavelength window (8410–8795Å) RAVE spectra are suitable to perform a chemical abundance analysis. For 234,227 spectra (to date April 2011) we derived abundance estimates for up to 7 elements, which makes RAVE the largest chemical abundances database existing today. We present here the radial chemical gradients of the Milky Way by using RAVE data.