The Color-Magnitude Diagram in Baade's Window Revisited

Abstract

We have reanalyzed the OGLE V and I photometry of ~500,000 stars in Baade's Window, and we confirm the extinction map published by Stanek. However, we find that the interpretation of the OGLE color-magnitude diagram for the disk stars proposed by Paczyński et al. was incorrect: the dominant disk population in Baade's Window is old, and we find no evidence for a large hole in the inner Galactic disk. We find evidence for a small systematic error in the OGLE photometry for stars below the ``red clump'': the (V-I) color indices of the faint stars with V > 18 are too red by ~0.1 mag. We find tentative evidence from the OGLE and HST photometry that the bulge main-sequence turnoff point is brighter by ~0.5 mag than it is in either 47 Tuc or NGC 6791, indicating that the dominant population of the Galactic bulge is considerably younger than those clusters.