The Swift UVOT Stars Survey: I. Methods and Test Clusters

Abstract

We describe the motivations and background of a large survey of nearby stel- lar populations using the Ultraviolet Optical Telescope (UVOT) aboard the Swift Gamma-Ray Burst Mission. UVOT, with its wide field, NUV sensitivity, and 2.3 spatial resolution, is uniquely suited to studying nearby stellar populations and providing insight into the NUV properties of hot stars and the contribution of those stars to the integrated light of more distant stellar populations. We review the state of UV stellar photometry, outline the survey, and address problems spe- cific to wide- and crowded-field UVOT photometry. We present color-magnitude diagrams of the nearby open clusters M 67, NGC 188, and NGC 2539, and the globular cluster M 79. We demonstrate that UVOT can easily discern the young- and intermediate-age main sequences, blue stragglers, and hot white dwarfs, pro- ducing results consistent with previous studies. We also find that it characterizes the blue horizontal branch of M 79 and easily identifies a known post-asymptotic giant branch star.

35 pages, 8 figures, accepted for publication in Astronomical Journal

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Cited by in corpus (16)

• GRB 221009A: Discovery of an Exceptionally Rare Nearby and Energetic Gamma-Ray Burst
• UVIT Open Cluster Study. II. Detection of extremely low mass white dwarfs and post-mass transfer binaries in M67
• The Swift/UVOT Stars Survey. III. Photometry and Color-Magnitude Diagrams of 103 Galactic Open Clusters
• UOCS.VI. UVIT/AstroSat detection of low-mass white dwarf companions to 4 more blue stragglers in M67
• UOCS-VIII. UV Study of the open cluster NGC 2506 using ASTROSAT
• GlobULeS-IV. UVIT/AstroSat detection of extremely low mass white dwarf companions to blue straggler stars in NGC 362
• A novel method to automatically detect and measure the ages of star clusters in nearby galaxies: Application to the Large Magellanic Cloud
• Green Bank Telescope Discovery of the Redback Binary Millisecond Pulsar PSR J0212+5321
• A Census of Above-Horizontal-Branch Stars in Galactic Globular Clusters
• Luminous Optical and X-ray Flaring of the Putative Redback Millisecond Pulsar 1FGL J0523.5$-$2529
• Optical photometry and spectroscopy of the low-luminosity, broad-lined Ic supernova iPTF15dld
• GlobULeS-V. UVIT/AstroSat studies of stellar populations in NGC 362: Detection of Blue Lurkers in a Globular Cluster
• Measuring Dust Attenuation Curves of SINGS/KINGFISH Galaxies Using Swift/UVOT Photometry
• Two Luminous Post-AGB Stars in the Galactic Globular Cluster M19
• Far-ultraviolet investigation into the galactic globular cluster M30 (NGC 7099): I. Photometry and radial distributions
• Discovery of a probable very fast extragalactic nova in a symbiotic binary