Kronberger 49 : a new low-mass globular cluster or an unprecedented bulge window

Abstract

We employ optical and near-infrared photometry to study the stars in the direction of the star cluster candidate Kronberger 49. The optical color–magnitude diagrams (V, I, and Gunn z photometry obtained with the Galileo Telescope) are tight and present evidence of a main-sequence turnoff. We may be dealing with a low-mass, metalrich globular cluster located in the bulge at a distance from the Sun of d = 8 ± 1 kpc. Alternatively, it may be a dust hole through which we are sampling the bulge stellar population affected by a very low amount of differential reddening.