Photometry and astrometry with JWST -- I. NIRCam Point Spread Functions and the first JWST colour-magnitude diagrams of a globular cluster

TL;DR

This paper presents the first JWST NIRCam point spread functions and colour-magnitude diagrams of a globular cluster, demonstrating high-precision photometry and revealing multiple stellar populations in M92.

Contribution

It provides empirical PSF models for JWST NIRCam filters and demonstrates their application in constructing detailed colour-magnitude diagrams of a globular cluster.

Findings

Empirical PSFs vary across the field and over time.

Photometric precision reaches ~0.01 mag in crowded regions.

Detected multiple stellar populations and white dwarf candidates.

Abstract

As the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has become fully operational, early-release data are now available to begin building the tools and calibrations for precision point-source photometry and astrometry in crowded cluster environments. Here, we present our independent reduction of NIRCam imaging of the metal-poor globular cluster M92, which were collected under Director's Discretionary Early Release Science programme ERS-1334. We derived empirical models of the Point Spread Function (PSF) for filters F090W, F150W, F277W, and F444W, and find that these PSFs: (i) are generally under-sampled (FWHM~2 pixel) in F150W and F444W and severely under-sampled (FWHM~1 pixel) in F090W and F277W; (ii) have significant variation across the field of view, up to ~15-20 %; and (iii) have temporal variations of ~3-4 % across multi-epoch exposures. We deployed our PSFs to determine the photometric precision of NIRCam for stars in the crowded, central regions of M92, measured to be at the ~0.01 mag level. We use these data to construct the first JWST colour-magnitude diagrams of a globular cluster. Employing existing stellar models, we find that the data reach almost the bottom of the M92 main sequence (~0.1 M$_{\odot}$), and reveal 24 white dwarf candidate members of M92 in the brightest portion of the white dwarf cooling sequence. The latter are confirmed through a cross-match with archival HST UV and optical data. We also detect the presence of multiple stellar populations along the low-mass main sequence of M92.