Toward Precision Photometry for the ELT Era: The Double Subgiant Branch of NGC 1851 Observed with the Gemini/GeMS MCAO System
Date Issued
2015
Author(s)
Turri, P.
•
McConnachie, A. W.
•
Stetson, P. B.
•
•
Andersen, D. R.
•
Véran, J. -P.
•
Bono, G.
Description
This research is based on observations obtained at the Gemini Observatory, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under a cooperative agreement with the NSF on behalf of the Gemini partnership: the National Science Foundation (United States); the National Research Council (Canada); CONICYT (Chile); the Australian Research Council (Australia); the Ministério da Ciência, Tecnologia e Inovação (Brazil); and the Ministerio de Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación Productiva (Argentina). Data were acquired through the Gemini Science Archive and processed using the Gemini IRAF package. G. Fiorentino has been supported by the FIRB 2013 (MIUR grant RBFR13J716). We appreciate the prompt support received from the GeMS staff for the image reduction. We are grateful to the adaptive optics group at NRC Herzberg for feedback on the system performance and to INAF—Osservatorio Astronomico di Bologna for insights on stellar populations in globular clusters. Facility: Gemini:South ( GeMS , GSAOI ).
Abstract
The Extremely Large Telescopes currently under construction have a collecting area that is an order of magnitude larger than the present largest optical telescopes. For seeing-limited observations the performance will scale as the collecting area, but with the successful use of adaptive optics (AO), for many applications it will scale as D4 (where D is the diameter of the primary mirror). Central to the success of the ELTs, therefore, is the successful use of multi-conjugate adaptive optics (MCAO) which applies a high degree of correction over a field of view larger than the few arcseconds that limits classical AO systems. In this Letter, we report on the analysis of crowded field images taken on the central region of the galactic globular cluster NGC 1851 in the Ks band using the Gemini Multi-conjugate Adaptive Optics System (GeMS) at the Gemini South Telescope, the only science-grade MCAO system in operation. We use this cluster as a benchmark to verify the ability to achieve precise near-infrared photometry by presenting the deepest Ks photometry in crowded fields ever obtained from the ground. We construct a color-magnitude diagram in combination with the F606W band from the Hubble Space Telescope/Advanced Camera for Surveys. As well as detecting the “knee” in the lower main sequence at Ks ≃ 20.5, we also detect the double subgiant branch of NGC 1851, which demonstrates the high photometric accuracy of GeMS in crowded fields.
Volume
811
Issue
2
Start page
L15
Issn Identifier
2041-8205
Ads BibCode
2015ApJ...811L..15T
Rights
open.access
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