Distance determination for RAVE stars. II.

Here we assume that the star undergoes a standard stellar evolution and that its spectrum shows no peculiarities. The refinements include: the use of either of the three isochrone sets, a better account of the stellar ages and masses, use of more realistic errors of stellar parameter values, and application to a larger dataset. The derived distances of both dwarfs and giants match within ~21% to the astrometric distances of Hipparcos stars and to the distances of observed members of open and globular clusters.

Multiple observations of a fraction of RAVE stars show that repeatability of the derived distances is even better, with half of the objects showing a distance scatter of <=11%. RAVE dwarfs are ~300pc from the Sun, and giants are at distances of 1 to 2kpc, and up to 10kpc. This places the RAVE dataset between the more local Geneva-Copenhagen survey and the more distant and fainter SDSS sample.

As such it is ideal to address some of the fundamental questions of Galactic structure and evolution in the pre-Gaia era. Individual applications are left to separate papers, here we show that the full 6-dimensional information on position and velocity is accurate enough to discuss the vertical structure and kinematic properties of the thin and thick disks.