The WFC3 Galactic Bulge Treasury Program: A First Look at Resolved Stellar Population Tools

TL;DR

The WFC3 Galactic Bulge Treasury program provides deep, multi-band imaging data to analyze stellar populations, enabling improved age, metallicity, and reddening estimates, and offering new tools for understanding bulge formation and stellar evolution.

Contribution

This paper introduces a new 5-band photometric system with calibration for WFC3, applied to bulge and cluster fields, enhancing the analysis of stellar populations beyond traditional CMD methods.

Findings

New 5-band photometric system enables better Teff and [Fe/H] estimates.

Calibration with star clusters improves population analysis.

Simulations show improved differentiation of star-formation histories.

Abstract

[Abridged] When WFC3 is installed on HST, the community will have powerful new tools for investigating resolved stellar populations. The WFC3 Galactic Bulge Treasury program will obtain deep imaging on 4 low-extinction fields. These non-proprietary data will enable a variety of science investigations not possible with previous data sets. To aid in planning for the use of these data and for future proposals, we provide an introduction to the program, its photometric system, and the associated calibration effort. The observing strategy is based upon a new 5-band photometric system spanning the UV, optical, and near-infrared. With these broad bands, one can construct reddening-free indices of Teff and [Fe/H]. Besides the 4 bulge fields, the program will target 6 fields in well-studied star clusters, spanning a wide range of [Fe/H]. The cluster data serve to calibrate the indices, provide population templates, and correct the transformation of isochrones into the WFC3 photometric system. The bulge data will shed light on the bulge formation history, and will also serve as population templates for other studies. One of the fields includes 12 candidate hosts of extrasolar planets. CMDs are the most popular tool for analyzing resolved stellar populations. However, due to degeneracies among Teff, [Fe/H], and reddening in traditional CMDs, it can be difficult to draw robust conclusions from the data. The 5-band system used for the bulge Treasury observations will provide indices that are roughly orthogonal in Teff and [Fe/H], and we argue that model fitting in an index-index diagram will make better use of the information than fitting separate CMDs. We provide simulations to show the expected data quality and the potential for differentiating between different star-formation histories.