An investigation of a method to determine the metallicity distribution function in the thick Disk

Abstract: The formation and evolution of the Milky Way is a subject under constant debate. Our understanding of the hierarchical structure for- mation of the Galaxy is limited and as it stands now, there are several different competeing models that aim to explain the observations. The initial aim of this project was to study vertical metallicity gradi- ents in the thick disk whilst applying a previously unused methodology to separate the two Galactic disks. Instead of separating the disk stars by looking at the stellar parameters we attempted to subtract a well determined metallicity distribution function (henceforth MDF) of the thin disk from the solar neigbourhood from a MDF of a field towards Draco. In doing so we found that the amount stars of solar and higher metallicity in our data from the field was much lower than we expected. This lead to a closer examination of the data where we first examined the metallicity scale of our different datasets and found no significant offset. This lead us to believe that there might be a selection bias in the data, due to limitations in time we could not make a thorough examination of what might be causing this, although we examined whether the cuts in magnitude could be responsible for the bias and found that this might be the case.