Photometric stellar surveys now cover a large fraction of the sky, probe to fainter magnitudes than large-scale spectroscopic studies, and are relatively free from the target-selection biases often associated with such studies. Photometric-metallicity estimates that include narrow/medium-band filters can achieve comparable accuracy and precision to existing low- and medium-resolution spectroscopic surveys such as SDSS/SEGUE and LAMOST, with metallicities as low as [Fe/H] $\sim -3.5$ to $-4.0$. Here we report on an effort to identify likely members of the Galactic disk system among the Very Metal-Poor (VMP; [Fe/H] $\leq$ -2) and Extremely Metal-Poor (EMP; [Fe/H] $\leq$ -3) stars. Our analysis is based on a sample of some 11.5 million stars with full space motions selected from the SkyMapper Southern Survey (SMSS) and Stellar Abundance and Galactic Evolution Survey (SAGES). After applying a number of quality cuts, designed to obtain the best available metallicity and dynamical estimates, we analyze a total of about 7.74 million stars in the combined SMSS/SAGES sample. We employ two techniques which, depending on the method, identify between 5,878 and 7,600 VMP stars (19% to 25% of all VMP stars) and between 345 and 399 EMP stars (35% to 40% of all EMP stars) that appear to be members of the Galactic disk system on highly prograde orbits (v$_{\phi} > 150$ kms$^{-1}$), the majority of which have low orbital eccentricities (ecc $\le 0.4$). The large fractions of VMP/EMP stars that are associated with the MW disk system strongly suggests the presence of an early forming ``primordial" disk.
Comment: The sample of VMP/EMP disk stars suffered from a large amount of contamination due to the presence of unrecognized main-sequence binaries, and were mis-classified as dwarfs. The actual number of likely VMP/EMP disk stars is substantially smaller than reported here, and current results should not be used. We are redoing the analysis with a more stringent set of selection criteria