Maximum Entropy Estimation of the Galactic Bulge Morphology via the VVV
  Red Clump
  The abundance and narrow magnitude dispersion of Red Clump (RC) stars make
them a popular candidate for mapping the morphology of the bulge region of the
Milky Way. Using an estimate of the RC's intrinsic luminosity function, we
extracted the three-dimensional density distribution of the RC from deep
photometric catalogues of the VISTA Variables in the Via Lactea (VVV) survey.
We used maximum entropy based deconvolution to extract the spatial distribution
of the bulge from Ks-band star counts. We obtained our extrapolated
non-parametric model of the bulge over the inner 40 by 40 degrees squared
region of the Galactic centre. Our reconstruction also naturally matches onto a
parametric fit to the bulge outside the VVV region and inpaints overcrowded and
high extinction regions. We found a range of bulge properties consistent with
other recent investigations based on the VVV data. In particular, we estimated
the bulge mass to be in the range 13 to 17 billion solar masses, the
X-component to be between 18% and 25% of the bulge mass, and the bulge angle
with respect to the Sun-Galactic centre line to be between 18 and 32 degrees.
Studies of the Fermi Large Area Telescope (LAT) gamma-ray Galactic centre
excess suggests that the excess may be traced by Galactic bulge distributed
sources. We applied our deconvolved density in a template fitting analysis of
this Fermi-LAT GeV excess and found an improvement in the fit compared to
previous parametric based templates.
