Reaching the oldest stars beyond the Local Group: ancient star formation in UGC 4483

TL;DR

This study uses high-quality Hubble Space Telescope data to resolve multiple stellar populations in UGC 4483, revealing its ancient star formation history, including the detection of horizontal branch stars and RR Lyrae variables, extending our understanding of the oldest stars beyond the Local Group.

Contribution

First detailed analysis of UGC 4483's stellar populations using deep HST imaging, revealing its ancient star formation and old stellar components.

Findings

Detected horizontal branch and RR Lyrae stars indicating old stellar populations.

Reconstructed star formation history showing most stars formed over 1 Gyr ago.

Estimated total stellar mass and refined distance measurement.

Abstract

We present new WFC3/UVIS observations of UGC 4483, the closest example of a metal-poor blue compact dwarf galaxy, with a metallicity of $Z \simeq 1/15\ Z_{\odot}$ and located at a distance of $D \simeq 3.4$ Mpc. The extremely high quality of our new data allows us to clearly resolve the multiple stellar evolutionary phases populating the color-magnitude diagram (CMD), to reach more than 4 mag deeper than the tip of the red giant branch, and to detect for the first time core He-burning stars with masses $\lesssim 2$ M$_{\odot}$, populating the red clump and possibly the horizontal branch (HB) of the galaxy. By applying the synthetic CMD method to our observations, we determine an average star formation rate over the whole Hubble time of at least $(7.01\pm0.44) \times 10^{-4}$ $\mathrm{M_{\odot}/yr}$, corresponding to a total astrated stellar mass of $(9.60\pm0.61)\times 10^6$ $\mathrm{M_{\odot}}$, 87% of which went into stars at epochs earlier than 1 Gyr ago. With our star formation history recovery method we find the best fit with a distance modulus of DM = $27.45\pm0.10$, slightly lower than previous estimates. Finally, we find strong evidence of an old ($\gtrsim 10$ Gyr) stellar population in UGC 4483 thanks to the detection of an HB phase and the identification of six candidate RR Lyrae variable stars.