Galactocentric Distance with the OGLE and [ITAL]Hipparcos[/ITAL] Red Clump Stars

We compare red clump stars with parallaxes known to better than 10% in the Hipparcos catalog and corrected for the interstellar extinction, with the OGLE red clump stars in Baade's Window also corrected for the interstellar extinction. There are $\sim 600$ and $\sim 10,000$ such stars in the two data sets, respectively. We find empirically that the average I-band magnitude of red clump stars does not depend on their intrinsic color in the range $ 0.8 < (V-I)_0 < 1.4 $. The red clump luminosity function is well represented by a gaussian with the peak at $ M_{I_0,m} = -0.26 $, and the dispersion $ \sigma _{RC} \approx 0.2 $ mag. This allows a single step determination of the distance to the galactic center and gives $ R_0 = 8.4 \pm 0.4 $ kpc. The number of red clump stars is so large that a formal statistical error is only $\sim 1%$. The local stars are relatively blue and have a small color dispersion: $<(V-I) > = 1.01, \sigma_{(V-I)} = 0.08$, while for the bulge stars $<(V-I)_0 > = 1.22, \sigma_{(V-I)_0} = 0.14$. Presumably, the bulge population has a broader range and a higher average metallicity than the local disk population.Comment: revised version re-submitted to the ApJL, 10 pages, 4 figure