Collaborative Project: A Comprehensive Survey of Hot Stars in the Galactic Bulge

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Peterson, RuthAstrophysical AdvancesAST-9900582Drs. Peterson, of Astrophysical Advances, and Terndrup, at the Ohio State University, will carry out a collaborative project to survey the Galactic bulge for hot stars, those with temperatures in excess of 20,000 K, that are thought to be the source of the excess Ultraviolet light found in old, metal-rich extragalactic systems. These stars have presented a puzzle, since such stars are not found in the metal-rich systems of globular clusters in our galaxy, yet are apparently common in elliptical galaxies and the bulges of other spiral galaxies. This photometric and spectroscopic survey will take a complete census of several fields in the bulge of our galaxy, where preliminary work has uncovered a statistically significant sample of these hot stars, and where large enough samples of a metal-rich population can be obtained to identify stars in short-lived phases of stellar evolution. The survey will identify the numbers of stars in each relevant evolutionary phase and derive metallicities for stars cool enough to be unaffected by diffusion, in several fields at varying distances from the Galactic center.