Examinando por Autor "Anderson, J."

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    High-precision astrometry with VVV - I. An independent reduction pipeline for VIRCAM@VISTA
    (Oxford University Press, 2015-04) Libralato, M.; Bellini, A.; Bedin, L.R.; Anderson, J.; Piotto, G.; Nascimbeni, V.; Platais, I.; Minniti, D.; Zoccali, M.
    We present a new reduction pipeline for the VIRCAM@VISTA detector and describe the method developed to obtain high-precision astrometry with the VISTA Variables in the Vía Láctea (VVV) data set. We derive an accurate geometric-distortion correction using as calibration field the globular cluster NGC 5139, and showed that we are able to reach a relative astrometric precision of about 8 mas per coordinate per exposure for well-measured stars over a field of view of more than 1 deg2. This geometric-distortion correction is made available to the community. As a test bed, we chose a field centred around the globular cluster NGC 6656 from the VVV archive and computed proper motions for the stars within. With 45 epochs spread over four years, we show that we are able to achieve a precision of 1.4 mas yr-1 and to isolate each population observed in the field (cluster, Bulge and Disc) using proper motions. We used proper-motion-selected field stars to measure the motion difference between Galactic disc and bulge stars. Our proper-motion measurements are consistent with UCAC4 and PPMXL, though our errors are much smaller. Models have still difficulties in reproducing the observations in this highly reddened Galactic regions. © 2015 The Authors Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society.
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    The WFC3 Galactic Bulge Treasury Program: Relative Ages of Bulge Stars of High and Low Metallicity
    (Institute of Physics Publishing, 2018-08) Renzini, A.; Gennaro, M.; Zoccali, M.; Brown, T.M.; Anderson, J.; Minniti, D.; Sahu, K.C.; Valenti, E.; Vandenberg, D.A.
    The Hubble Space Telescope/WFC3 multiband photometry spanning from the UV to the near-IR of four fields in the Galactic bulge, together with that for six template globular and open clusters, are used to photometrically tag the metallicity [Fe/H] of stars in these fields after proper-motion rejecting most foreground disk contaminants. Color-magnitude diagrams and luminosity functions (LF) are then constructed, in particular for the most metal-rich and most metal-poor stars in each field. We do not find any significant difference between the I-band and H-band LFs, hence turnoff luminosity and age of the metal-rich and metal-poor components therefore appear essentially coeval. In particular, we find that no more than ∼3% of the metal-rich component can be ∼5 Gyr old, or younger. Conversely, theoretical LFs match well to the observed ones for an age of ∼10 Gyr. Assuming this age is representative for the bulk of bulge stars, we then recall the observed properties of star-forming galaxies at 10 Gyr lookback time, i.e., at z ∼ 2, and speculate about bulge formation in that context. We argue that bar formation and buckling instabilities leading to the observed boxy/peanut, X-shaped bulge may have arisen late in the history of the Milky Way Galaxy, once its gas fraction had decreased compared to the high values typical of high-redshift galaxies. This paper follows the public release of the photometric and astrometric catalogs of the measured stars in the four fields. © 2018. The American Astronomical Society.