Red Clump Morphology as Evidence Against a New Intervening Stellar Population as the Primary Source of Microlensing Toward the LMC

Details Red Clump Morphology as Evidence Against a New Intervening Stellar Population as the Primary Source of Microlensing Toward the LMC Red Clump Morphology as Evidence Against a New Intervening Stellar Population as the Primary Source of Microlensing Toward the LMC

1997-10-15

arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9710156v2

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astrophysics

21 pages LaTex (aaspp4.sty), including three tables and 9 figures (1 is .ps, 8 are .gif). Accepted for publication by Astronom

Scientific paper

10.1086/300400

We examine the morphology of the color-magnitude diagram (CMD) for core helium-burning (red clump) stars to test the recent suggestion by Zaritsky & Lin (1997) that an extension of the red clump in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) toward brighter magnitudes is due to an intervening population of stars that is responsible for a significant fraction of the observed microlensing toward the LMC. Using our own CCD photometry of several fields across the LMC, we confirm the presence of this additional red clump feature, but conclude that it is caused by stellar evolution rather than a foreground population. We do this by demonstrating that the feature (1) is present in all our LMC fields, (2) is in precise agreement with the location of the blue loops in the isochrones of intermediate age red clump stars with the metallicity and age of the LMC, (3) has a relative density consistent with stellar evolution and LMC star formation history, and (4) is present in the Hipparcos CMD for the solar neighborhood where an intervening population cannot be invoked. Assuming there is no systematic shift in the model isochrones, which fit the Hipparcos data in detail, a distance modulus of $\mu_{LMC} = 18.3$ provides the best fit to our dereddened CMD.

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