Josh Peek edited abstract.tex  almost 8 years ago

Commit id: f52fbf120995e3e227efecb19ba57d5d3ccecf17

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We present medium-resolution, near-ultraviolet VLT/FLAMES observations of the star USNO-A0600-15865535. We adapt a standard method of stellar typing to our measurement of the shape of the  Balmer $\epsilon$ absorption line to demonstrate that USNO-A0600-15865535 is a blue horizontal branch star, residing in the lower stellar halo at a distance of 4.4 kpc from the Sun. We measure the H \& K lines of singly-ionized calcium and find two isolated velocity components, one originating in the disk, and one associated with high-velocity cloud complex WD. This detection is the first distance constraint on the +100 km/s neutral Galactic complex of clouds. We find that Complex WD is not in corotation with the Galactic disk as has been assumed for decades. We examine a number of scenarios, and find that the most likely is that Complex WD was ejected from the solar neighborhood and is only a few kpc from the Sun.