Faint Stars in a Faint Galaxy: I. Ultra Deep Photometry of the Boötes I Ultra Faint Dwarf Galaxy [GA]

http://arxiv.org/abs/2008.06089


We present an analysis of new extremely deep images of the resolved stellar population of the Bo\”otes I ultra faint dwarf spheroidal galaxy. These new data were taken with the Hubble Space Telescope, using the Advanced Camera for Surveys (Wide Field Camera) and Wide Field Camera 3 (UVIS), with filters F606W and F814W (essentially V and I), as part of a program to derive the low-mass stellar initial mass function in this galaxy. We compare and contrast two approaches to obtaining the stellar photometry, namely ePSF and DAOPHOT. We identify likely members of Bo\”otes I based on the location of each star on the color-magnitude diagram, obtained with the DAOPHOT photometry from the ACS/WFC data. The probable members lie close to stellar isochrones that were chosen to encompass the known metallicity distribution derived from spectroscopic data of brighter radial-velocity member stars and are consistent with the main-sequence turnoff. The resulting luminosity function of the Bo\”otes I galaxy has a 50% completeness limit of 27.4 in F814W and 28.2 in F606W (Vega magnitude system), which corresponds to a limiting stellar mass of $\le 0.3 M_\odot$.

Read this paper on arXiv…

C. Filion, V. Kozhurina-Platais, R. Avila, et. al.
Mon, 17 Aug 20
-1000/40

Comments: 21 pages, 15 figures, 2 tables; accepted for publication in ApJ