Milky Way demographics with the VVV survey: IV. PSF photometry from almost one billion stars in the Galactic bulge and adjacent southern disk

Indexación: Scopus.Acknowledgements. The authors gratefully acknowledge the use of data from the ESO Public Survey program ID 179.B-2002, taken with the VISTA telescope, and data products from the Cambridge Astronomical Survey Unit. This work was supported by the Ministry of Economy, Development, and Tourism’s Millennium Science Initiative through grant IC120009, awarded to the Millennium Institute of Astrophysics (MAS), and by he BASAL Center for Astrophysics and Associated Technologies (CATA) through grant PFB-06. J.A-G. also acknowledges support by FONDECYT Iniciación 11150916 and by the Ministry of Education through grant ANT-1655. R.K.S. acknowledges support from CNPq/Brazil through projects 308968/2016-6 and 421687/2016-9. M.C. and M.Z. acknowledge additional support by FONDECYT Regular 1171273 and 1150345, respectively. The Geryon cluster housed at the Centro de Astro-Ingenieria UC was used for part of the calculations performed in this paper. The BASAL PFB-06 CATA, Anillo ACT-86, FONDEQUIP AIC-57, and QUIMAL 130008 provided funding for several improvements to the Geryon cluster.Context. The inner regions of the Galaxy are severely affected by extinction, which limits our capability to study the stellar populations present there. The Vista Variables in the Vía Láctea (VVV) ESO Public Survey has observed this zone at near-infrared wavelengths where reddening is highly diminished. Aims. By exploiting the high resolution and wide field-of-view of the VVV images we aim to produce a deep, homogeneous, and highly complete database of sources that cover the innermost regions of our Galaxy. Methods. To better deal with the high crowding in the surveyed areas, we have used point spread function (PSF)-fitting techniques to obtain a new photometry of the VVV images, in the ZY JHKs near-infrared filters available. Results. Our final catalogs contain close to one billion sources, with precise photometry in up to five near-infrared filters, and they are already being used to provide an unprecedented view of the inner Galactic stellar populations. We make these catalogs publicly available to the community. Our catalogs allow us to build the VVV giga-CMD, a series of color-magnitude diagrams of the inner regions of the Milky Way presented as supplementary videos. We provide a qualitative analysis of some representative CMDs of the inner regions of the Galaxy, and briefly mention some of the studies we have developed with this new dataset so far. © ESO 2018.https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/abs/2018/11/aa33432-18/aa33432-18.htm