Structure of our Galactic Bulge from CN Measurements

Abstract

The double red clumps (DRCs) are now dominantly believed to be the strong observational line of evidence of the so-called X-shaped Galactic bar structures. Recently, Lee et al. reported a subtle mean \ds\ difference between the DRCs and suggested a dichotomic picture that can be seen in globular clusters: the faint red clump is the first generation, while the bright red clump corresponds to the second generation (SG). They argued that the magnitude difference between the DRCs is due to different stellar populations, and is not due to the geometric difference between the DRCs. Our reanalysis shows that their data do not appear to support the idea of the multiple population-induced DRCs in our Galactic bulge. We perform fully empirical Monte Carlo simulations and find that the shape of the \ds\ distributions is the most stringent evidence to pursue. Our results strongly suggest that the CN distributions toward the Galactic bulge are qualitatively consistent with the X-shaped Galactic bulge with a minor fraction of the SG of about 2 -- 3\%.

arXiv commentApJL in press

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• Multiple stellar populations along the red Horizontal Branch and Red Clump of Globular Clusters
• Multiple Stellar Populations of Globular Clusters From Homogeneous Ca-CN-CH-NH Photometry. VII. Metal-Poor Populations in 47 Tucanae (NGC 104)
• Multiple Stellar Populations of Globular Clusters from Homogeneous Ca-CN-CH-NH Photometry. VI. M3 (NGC 5272) is not a Prototypical Normal Globular Cluster
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