We examine the morphology of the color-magnitude diagram ( CMD ) for core helium-burning ( red clump ) stars to test the recent suggestion by Zaritsky & Lin ( 1997 ) that an extension of the red clump in the Large Magellanic Cloud ( LMC ) toward brighter magnitudes is due to an intervening population of stars that is responsible for a significant fraction of the observed microlensing toward the LMC .
Using our own CCD photometry of several fields across the LMC , we confirm the presence of this additional red clump feature , but conclude that it is caused by stellar evolution rather than a foreground population .
We do this by demonstrating that the feature ( 1 ) is present in all our LMC fields , ( 2 ) is in precise agreement with the location of the blue loops in the isochrones of intermediate age red clump stars with the metallicity and age of the LMC , ( 3 ) has a relative density consistent with stellar evolution and LMC star formation history , and ( 4 ) is present in the Hipparcos CMD for the solar neighborhood where an intervening population can not be invoked .
Assuming there is no systematic shift in the model isochrones , which fit the Hipparcos data in detail , a distance modulus of \mu _ { LMC } = 18.3 provides the best fit to our dereddened CMD .