A New Photometric Model of the Galactic Bar using Red Clump Giants

Understand

We present a study of the luminosity density distribution of the Galactic bar using number counts of red clump giants (RCGs) from the OGLE-III survey.

• The data were recently published by Nataf et al.
• (2013) for 9019 fields towards the bulge and have $2.94\times 10^6$ RC stars over a viewing area of $90.25 \,\textrm{deg}^2$.
• The data include the number counts, mean distance modulus ($\mu$), dispersion in $\mu$ and full error matrix, from which we fit the data with several tri-axial parametric models.