Multiwavelength Absolute Magnitudes and Colours of Red Clump Stars in {\it Gaia} Era

Abstract: This study presents the multi-wavelength investigation of the absolute magnitudes and colours of the red clump (RC) stars selected from APOGEE and GALAH DR2 combined catalogue which is complemented with {\it Gaia} DR2 astrometric data and multi-wavelength photometric data of {\it GALEX} GR6/7, SDSS DR7, {\it Gaia} DR2, 2MASS and {\it WISE} sky surveys. The analyses are centred on the different distance estimation methods using {\it Gaia} trigonometric parallaxes, (1/$\varpi$) and Bayes statistics, and chemically defined Galactic disc populations on [$\alpha$/Fe]$\times$[Fe/H] plane. Such investigation questions the long studied problem of the population effects on RC luminosity. Using two different distance estimation approach, (i) chemical thin and chemical thick disc RC stars are shown to have different absolute magnitudes, while colours remain the same in all photometric bands. Absolute magnitudes vary between -0.12 and +0.13 mag for the 1/$\varpi$ with the change of the Galactic population. This variation in absolute magnitudes is found to be larger for the other method. (ii) The Besan\c con population synthesis model of Galaxy for 2MASS photometry, in which the absolute magnitude difference between chemical populations were found between -0.35 and -0.40 mag from thin disc to thick disc. When results compared with each other, differences of absolute magnitudes are about three times larger in the model than observations. We confirm that the RC absolute magnitudes depend on $\alpha$-element abundances of Galactic populations.