Below you will find a list of BDBS-related publications by team members. Please indicate the name of the authors, a brief overview of co-authorship (ala "Core members", "Open to all" etc), and the status (e.g., first draft circulated, submitted, accepted, or publication details).
R.M. Rich, C.I. Johnson, M. Young, et al. 2020, MNRAS: The Blanco DECam Bulge Survey. I. The Survey Description and Early Results
Status: submitted to MNRAS on April 12, 2020
Abstract: The Blanco Dark Energy Camera (DECam) Bulge survey is a Vera Rubin Observatory (LSST) pathfinder imaging survey, spanning ⇠ 200 sq. deg. of the Southern Galactic bulge, 2 <b< 13 and 11 <l< +11 . We have employed the CTIO-4m telescope and the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) to image a contiguous ⇠ 200 sq. deg. region of the relatively less reddened Southern Galactic bulge, in SDSS u + Pan-STARRSgrizY. Optical photometry with its large color baseline will be used to investigate the age and metallicity distributions of the major structures of the bulge. Included in the survey footprint are 26 globular clusters imaged in all passbands. Over much of the bulge, we have Gaia DR2 matching astrometry to i ⇠ 18, deep enough to reach the faint end of the red clump. This paper provides the background, scientific case, and description of the survey. We present an array of new reddening-corrected colour-magnitude diagrams that span the extent of Southern Galactic bulge. We show that putative young, massive "blue loop" stars proposed as a recent star forming population instead lie at ⇠ 2 kpc from the Sun and are likely red clump giants in the old disk. A bright red clump near (l, b) = (+8 , 4 ) may be a feature in the foreground disk, or related to the long bar reported in earlier work. We also report the first map of the blue horizontal branch population spanning the BDBS field of regard, and show previously reported new bulge globular clusters cannot be confirmed as real.