Top panels: spatial distribution of T2Cs (left column) and RRLs (right column) projected onto the Galactic plane. RRLs are drawn for each representative T2C from the parent sample of RRLs in the VVV survey. The black circles represent projected mean line-of-sight distances in different longitude bins and error bars display 3σ standard deviation of the mean. The dotted lines represent the line of sight corresponding to l = ± 5 and l = ± 10. Bottom panels: the spatial distribution of T2Cs and RRLs in the latitude stripe −2 > b > −4 (large blue dots) and outside these latitudes (small magenta dots) are compared with the mean red clump giants’ distances (red plus symbols). The mean distances to red clump giants are derived from peaks of Gaussian distributions in each 1 sq. deg. field for latitudes in the range −2 > b > −4 (Gonzalez et al. 2012; Valenti et al. 2016), and assuming a mean absolute magnitude M_K = −1.61 ± 0.015 (Laney et al. 2012).