HOT HORIZONTAL BRANCH STARS IN ω CENTAURI: CLUES ABOUT THEIR ORIGIN FROM THE CLUSTER COLOR MAGNITUDE DIAGRAM

We investigate a peculiar feature at the hottest, blue end of the horizontal branch of Galactic globular cluster omega Centauri, using the high-precision and nearly complete catalog that has been constructed from a survey taken with the Advanced Camera for Survey on board the Hubble Space Telescope, that covers the inner 10 x 10 arcmin. It is a densely populated clump of stars with an almost vertical structure in the F435W-(F435W-F625W) plane, that we termed "blue clump." A comparison with theoretical models leads to the conclusion that this feature must necessarily harbor either hot flasher stars or canonical He-rich stars-progeny of the blue main sequence (MS) subpopulation observed in this cluster-or a mixture of both types, plus possibly a component from the normal-He population hosted by the cluster. A strong constraint coming from theory is that the mass of the objects in the "blue clump" has to be very finely tuned, with a spread of at most only similar to 0.03M(circle dot). By comparing observed and theoretical star counts along both the H-and He-burning stages we find that at least 15% of the expected He-rich horizontal branch stars are missing from the color-magnitude diagram. This missing population could be the progeny of red giants that failed to ignite central He-burning and have produced He-core white dwarfs (WDs). Our conclusion supports the scenario recently suggested by Calamida et al. for explaining the observed ratio of WDs to MS stars in omega Centauri.