JWST NIRCam photometry of M 92 stars

As the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has become fully operational, early release data are now available to begin building the tools and calibrations for precision point-source photometry and astrometry in crowded cluster environments. Here, we present our independent reduction of NIRCam imaging of the metal-poor globular cluster M 92, which were collected under Director's Discretionary Early Release Science programme ERS-1334. We derived empirical models of the point spread function (PSF) for filters F090W, F150W, F277W, and F444W, and find that these PSFs: (i) are generally undersampled (FWHM ~ 2 pixel) in F150W and F444W and severely undersampled (FWHM ~ 1 pixel) in F090W and F277W; (ii) have significant variation across the field of view, up to ~15-20 per cent; and (iii) have temporal variations of ~ 3-4 per cent across multi-epoch exposures. We deployed our PSFs to determine the photometric precision of NIRCam for stars in the crowded, central regions of M 92, measured to be at the ~0.01 mag level. We use these data to construct the first JWST colour-magnitude diagrams of a globular cluster. Employing existing stellar models, we find that the data reach almost the bottom of the M 92 main sequence (~0.1 M_{sun}_), and reveal 24 white dwarf candidate members of M 92 in the brightest portion of the white dwarf cooling sequence. The latter are confirmed through a cross-match with archival HST UV and optical data. We also detect the presence of multiple stellar populations along the low-mass main sequence of M 92.

Identifier
Source https://dc.g-vo.org/rr/q/lp/custom/CDS.VizieR/J/MNRAS/517/484
Related Identifier https://cdsarc.cds.unistra.fr/viz-bin/cat/J/MNRAS/517/484
Related Identifier https://vizier.cds.unistra.fr/viz-bin/VizieR-2?-source=J/MNRAS/517/484
Metadata Access http://dc.g-vo.org/rr/q/pmh/pubreg.xml?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_b2find&identifier=ivo://CDS.VizieR/J/MNRAS/517/484
Provenance
Creator Nardiello D.; Bedin L.R.; Burgasser A.; Salaris M.; Cassisi S.; Griggio M.,Scalco M.
Publisher CDS
Publication Year 2025
Rights https://cds.unistra.fr/vizier-org/licences_vizier.html
OpenAccess true
Contact CDS support team <cds-question(at)unistra.fr>
Representation
Resource Type Dataset; AstroObjects
Discipline Astrophysics and Astronomy; Natural Sciences; Observational Astronomy; Physics; Stellar Astronomy