K-Band Calibration of the Red Clump Luminosity

By D. Alves. 2000

177 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The average near-infrared (K-band) luminosity of 238 Hipparcos red clump giants is derived and then used to measure the distance to the Galactic center. These Hipparcos red clump giants have been previously employed as I-band standard candles. The advantage of the K-band is a decreased sensitivity to reddening and perhaps a reduced systematic dependence on metallicity. In order to investigate the latter, and also to refer our calibration to a known metallicity zero point, we restrict our sample of red clump calibrators to those with abundances derived from high-resolution spectroscopic data. The mean metallicity of the sample is [Fe/H] = -0.18 dex (σ = 0.17 dex). The data are consistent with no correlation between MK and [Fe/H] and only weakly constrain the slope of this relation. The luminosity function of the sample peaks at MK = -1.61 ± 0.03 mag. Next, we assemble published optical and near-infrared photometry for ~20 red clump giants in a Baade's window field with a mean metallicity of [Fe/H] = -0.17 ± 0.09 dex, which is nearly identical to that of the Hipparcos red clump. Assuming that the average (V-I)0 and (V-K)0 colors of these two red clumps are the same, the extinctions in the Baade's window field are found to be AV = 1.56, AI = 0.87, and AK = 0.15, in agreement with previous estimates. We derive the distance to the Galactic center: (m - M)0 = 14.58 ± 0.11 mag, or R = 8.24 ± 0.42 kpc. The uncertainty in this distance measurement is dominated by the small number of Baade's window red clump giants examined here.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a9093f172d821aa893dfee7c1a8a2b6704841163

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. Hans-Walter Rix
2. O. Gerhard
3. Jo Bovy
4. I. Minchev
5. Joss Bland-Hawthorn
6. P. Hopkins
7. L. Hernquist
8. A. Helmi

In Instrumentation

1. O. Gerhard
2. Hans-Walter Rix
3. Joss Bland-Hawthorn
4. I. Minchev
5. Jo Bovy
6. P. Hopkins
7. A. Helmi
8. L. Hernquist

Citations in the corpus

• THE APOGEE RED-CLUMP CATALOG: PRECISE DISTANCES, VELOCITIES, AND HIGH-RESOLUTION ELEMENTAL ABUNDANCES OVER A LARGE AREA OF THE MILKY WAY'S DISK (2014, methodology): “We choose the recent Laney et al. (2012) calibration of MKs = −1.61 of local RC stars, which is in very good agreement with the results of Alves (2000), but is 0.07mag brighter than the calibration of Groenewegen (2008).”
• THE DISTANCE, MASS, AND RADIUS OF THE NEUTRON STAR IN 4U 1608−52 (2008, background): “These values are consistent with the results derived by Alves (2000) from the Hipparcos red clump data and also with the results obtained by Grocholski & Sarajedini (2002) for open clusters.”
• Population effects on the red giant clump absolute magnitude: The K-band (2002, methodology): “Alves (2000) has derived MRCK = −1.61±0.03 for the local RC stars with Hipparcos parallaxes and spectroscopic metallicities, and obtained a distance to the Galactic centre (µ0 = 14.58±0.11, or 8.24±0.42 Kpc) using the observed RC K-band magnitude for a sample of Baade’s window RC stars with the…”
• An Extended Star Formation History for the Galactic Center from Hubble Space Telescope NICMOS Observations (2003, result): “This figure agrees well with observed data of red clump stars for the ancient population of Baade’s Window, for which mRC=13.12 (Alves 2000).”
• Reddening and metallicity maps of the Milky Way bulge from VVV and 2MASS II. The complete high resolution extinction map and implications for Galactic bulge studies (2012, unknown): “The influence of population effects on the RC magnitudes and color has been investigated both theoretically (Girardi & Salaris 2001; Salaris & Girardi 2002) and observationally (Alves 2000; Grocholski & Sarajedini 2002; Pietrzyński et al. 2003; Laney et al. 2012).”
• ARGOS - III. Stellar populations in the Galactic bulge of the Milky Way (2012, methodology): “Although this value includes the intrinsic error of the parallax measurement which has aσMKπ = 0.1 (Alves 2000), we adopt the intrinsic dispersion of the clumpto be σK ≈ 0.22 to include the small contribution from reddening c© 2012 RAS, MNRAS000, 1—-?? and magnitude errors described above.”
• Mapping the three-dimensional density of the galactic bulge with VVV red clump stars (2013, methodology): “The K-band magnitude of the RC is slightly brighter than the value from solar-neighbourhood RC stars (−1.61, Alves 2000; Laney et al. 2012).”
• The Wobbly Galaxy : kinematics north and south with RAVE red-clump giants (2013, background): “To establish just how these distance errors affect our results, we calculated (VR, Vφ , VZ) for stars in the solar cylinder (7.5 R kpc−1 8.5) from the pseudo-data produced by GALAXIA using both the true distance to each star, and the distance one infers from the star’s apparent magnitude and a s”
• Peering through the veil: near-infrared photometry and extinction for the Galactic nuclear star cluster (2009, background): “The luminosities and colors of RC stars are narrowly distributed and are only weakly dependent on age and metallicity, particularly for clus- ters older than ∼1.6 Gyr (e.g., Castellani et al. 1992; Alves 2000; Grocholski & Sarajedini 2002).”
• Evolution of Stars and Stellar Populations (2005, unknown): “This approach has shown, as an example, that the difference between the mean V magnitude of the He-burning phase in the solar neighbourhood (for which accurate parallax-based determinations provide MV = 0 73± 0 03 – see [3]) and in the LMC, as predicted by the current SFH estimates, is equal to 0.”
• Cosmic Rays below Z = 30 in a Diffusion Model: New Constraints on Propagation Parameters (2001, background): “The solar system is located in the Galactic disk (z\ 0) and at a Galactocentric distance kpcR _ \ 8 (Stanek & Garnavich 1998 ; Alves 2000).”
• TWO RED CLUMPS AND THE X-SHAPED MILKY WAY BULGE (2010, methodology): “Here we adopt an unreddened 2MASS (J−K)0=0.61 for the −8 ◦ bulge red clump, based on the Alves (2000) mean CIT V−K=2.35 for solar neighborhood RC stars, the Alonso et al. (1999) color-Teff relations and the CIT–2MASS color transformations of Carpenter (2005 unpublished) 2.”
• The Adequacy of Stellar Evolution Models for the Interpretation of the Color-Magnitude Diagrams of Resolved Stellar Populations (2005, background): “Other authors have explored the possibility that the K magnitude of the RC might be less sensitive to population effects and reddening uncertainties, with no clear consensus (see Alves 2000; Grocholski & Sarajedini 2002; Salaris & Girardi 2002; Pietrzynśki, Gieren & Udalski 2003).”
• M33: A Galaxy with No Supermassive Black Hole (2001, methodology): “Since we don’t have aK-band profile at the desired spatial resolution, we construct one by using theV − I profile to estimateV − K. Giant stars have a monotonic and smooth relationship betweenV − I andV − K (Alves 2000, and references therein).”
• Interstellar Extinction Law in the J, H, and Ks Bands toward the Galactic Center (2006, background): “Alves (2000) derived the average K band luminosity of 238 Hipparcos RC stars, MK = −1.61 ± 0.01, and their precise calibration is possible.”