SIMBAD references

We explore the outer Galactic disc up to a Galactocentric distance of ≃30kpc to derive its parameters and measure the magnitude of its flare. We obtained the 3D density of stars of type F8V-G5V with a colour selection from extinction-corrected photometric data of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey - Sloan Extension for Galactic Understanding and Exploration (SDSS-SEGUE) over 1400 deg² in off-plane low Galactic latitude regions and fitted it to a model of flared thin+thick disc. The best-fit parameters are a thin-disc scale length of 2.0kpc, a thin-disc scale height at solar Galactocentric distance of 0.24kpc, a thick-disc scale length of 2.5kpc, and a thick-disc scale height at solar Galactocentric distance of 0.71kpc. We derive a flaring in both discs that causes the scale height of the average disc to be multiplied with respect to the solar neighbourhood value by a factor of 3.3^+2.2_–1.6 at R=15kpc and by a factor of 12⁺²⁰_–7 at R=25kpc. The flare is quite prominent at large R and its presence explains the apparent depletion of in-plane stars that are often confused with a cut-off at R>15kpc. Indeed, our Galactic disc does not present a truncation or abrupt fall-off there, but the stars are spread in off-plane regions, even at z of several kpc for R>20kpc. Moreover, the smoothness of the observed stellar distribution also suggests that there is a continuous structure and not a combination of a Galactic disc plus some other substructure or extragalactic component: the hypothesis to interpret the Monoceros ring in terms of a tidal stream of a putative accreted dwarf galaxy is not only unnecessary because the observed flare explains the overdensity in the Monoceros ring observed in SDSS fields, but it appears to be inappropriate.