The Distances to Open Clusters from Main-Sequence Fitting. V. Extension of Color Calibration and Test using Cool and Metal-Rich Stars in NGC 6791

Abstract

We extend our effort to calibrate stellar isochrones in the Johnson-Cousins ($BV{I}_C$) and the 2MASS ($JH{K}_s$) filter systems based on observations of well-studied open clusters. Using cool main-sequence (MS) stars in Praesepe, we define empirical corrections to the Lejeune et al. color-effective temperature ($T_{\mathrm{eff}}$) relations down to $T_{\mathrm{eff}}\sim 3600$ K, complementing our previous work based on the Hyades and the Pleiades. We apply empirically corrected isochrones to existing optical and near-infrared photometry of cool ($T_{\mathrm{eff}}\le 5500$ K) and metal-rich ([Fe/H]$=+0.37$) MS stars in NGC 6791. The current methodology relies on an assumption that color-$T_{\mathrm{eff}}$ corrections are independent of metallicity, but we find that estimates of color-excess and distance from color-magnitude diagrams with different color indices converge on each other at the precisely known metallicity of the cluster. Along with a satisfactory agreement with eclipsing binary data in the cluster, we view the improved internal consistency as a validation of our calibrated isochrones at super-solar metallicities. For very cool stars ($T_{\mathrm{eff}}\le 4800$ K), however, we find that $B-V$ colors of our models are systematically redder than the cluster photometry by $\sim 0.02$ mag. We use color-$T_{\mathrm{eff}}$ transformations from the infrared flux method (IRFM) and alternative photometry to examine a potential color-scale error in the input cluster photometry. After excluding $B-V$ photometry of these cool MS stars, we derive $E(B-V)=0.105\pm 0.014$, [M/H]$=+0.42\pm 0.07$, $(m-M{)}_0=13.04\pm 0.08$, and the age of $9.5\pm 0.3$ Gyr for NGC 6791.

24 pages, 20 figures. Accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal

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