The Ages of Galactic Bulge Stars with Realistic Uncertainties

Understand

Using modern isochrones with customized physics and carefully considered statistical techniques, we recompute the age distribution for a sample of 91 micro-lensed dwarfs in the Galactic bulge presented by Bensby et al.

• (2017) and do not produce an age distribution consistent with their results.
• In particular, our analysis finds that only 15 of 91 stars have ages younger than 7 Gyr, compared to their finding of 42 young stars in the same sample.
• While we do not find a constituency of very young stars, our results do suggest the presence of an $\sim8$ Gyr population at the highest metallicities, thus contributing to long-standing debate about the age--metallicity distribution of the Galactic bulge.