The red clump stars as a distance indicator : review and application

Peter, Camaren

The red clump stars as a distance indicator : review and application

Master Thesis

2002

Publisher

University of Cape Town

Department

Department of Astronomy

Faculty

Faculty of Science

Abstract

The intention of this project was primarily to determine the distance to the Galactic Centre using a new technique pioneered by Paczynski and Stanek (1998) that uses the red clump stars as a standard candle. This was made possible by the large number of stars simultaneously observed by the OGLE microlensing project which yields well-deﬁned red clump structures in their colour magnitude diagrams. We have used data obtained at Sutherland in July 1997, in collaboration with the PLANET microlensing project. It was hoped that the observation of a number of lensing events occurring in ﬁelds in the Galactic Bulge region would reveal information about the Galactic structure in that region and perhaps yield information about the lens masses. The red clump technique is reviewed and applied to several 3x 3 arcminﬁelds observed at low galactic latitude and longitude in the Galactic Bulge. The derived distances to the fields show consistency with the E2 bar model proposed by Stanek, and indicate that the distance from our sun to the Galactic Centre is 7.97± 0.4 kpc. Furthermore, an attempt is made to apply the derived individual distance to each field to calculate the possible lens mass associated with each event.

Description

Bibliography: leaves 76-81.

Keywords

Astronomy

Reference:

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