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Post Info TOPIC: Globular Clusters


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RE: Globular Clusters
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Starbursts May Actually Destroy Globular Clusters



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Globular star clusters: the survivors of a 13 billion year old massacre

Our Milky Way galaxy is surrounded by some 200 compact groups of stars, containing up to a million stars each. At 13 billion years of age, these globular clusters are almost as old as the universe itself and were born when the first generations of stars and galaxies formed. Now a team of astronomers from Germany and the Netherlands have conducted a novel type of computer simulation that looked at how they were born - and they find that these giant clusters of stars are the only survivors of a 13 billion year-old massacre that destroyed many of their smaller siblings. The new work, led by Dr Diederik Kruijssen of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching, Germany, appears in a paper in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
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Globular star clusters: The survivors of a massacre 13 billion years ago

Our Milky Way galaxy is surrounded by some 200 compact groups of stars, containing up to a million stars each. These globular clusters are almost as old as the universe itself and hold valuable information on how the first generations of stars and galaxies formed. Now a team of astronomers from Germany and the Netherlands have conducted a novel type of computer simulation that looked at how they were born - and they find that these giant clusters of stars are the only survivors of a 13 billion year-old massacre that destroyed many of their smaller siblings. The new work, led by Dr Diederik Kruijssen of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching appears in a paper in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
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Title: A Comparison Between the Half-Light Radii, Luminosities, and UBV Colours of Globular Clusters in M31 and the Galaxy
Authors: Sidney van den Bergh

The Milky Way System and the Andromeda galaxy experienced radically different evolutionary histories. Nevertheless, it is found that these two galaxies ended up with globular cluster systems in which individual clusters have indistinguishable distributions of half-light radii. Furthermore globulars in both M31 and the Galaxy are found to have radii that are independent of their luminosities. In this respect globular clusters differ drastically from early-type galaxies in which half-light radius and luminosity are tightly correlated. Metal-rich globular clusters in M31 occupy a slightly larger volume than do those in the Galaxy. The specific globular cluster frequency in the Andromeda galaxy is found to he significantly higher than it is in the Milky Way System. The present discussion is based on the 107 Galactic globular clusters, and 200 putative globulars in M31, for which UBV photometry was available.

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Title: Initial conditions for globular clusters and assembly of the old globular cluster population of the Milky Way
Authors: Michael Marks, Pavel Kroupa
(Version v2)

Comparing N-body calculations that include primordial residual-gas expulsion with the observed properties of 20 Galactic globular clusters (GCs) for which the stellar mass function (MF) has been measured, we constrain the time-scale over which the gas of their embedded counterparts must have been removed, the star formation efficiency the progenitor cloud must have had and the strength of the tidal-field the clusters must have formed in. The three parameters determine the expansion and mass-loss during residual-gas expulsion. After applying corrections for stellar and dynamical evolution we find birth cluster masses, sizes and densities for the GC sample and the same quantities for the progenitor gas clouds. The pre-cluster cloud core masses were between 105-107 Msun and half-mass radii were typically below 1 pc and reach down to 0.2 pc. We show that the low-mass present day MF slope, initial half-mass radius and initial density of clusters correlates with cluster metallicity, unmasking metallicity as an important parameter driving cluster formation and the gas expulsion process. This work predicts that PD low-concentration clusters should have a higher binary fraction than PD high-concentration clusters.
Since the oldest GCs are early residuals from the formation of the Milky Way (MW) and the derived initial conditions probe the environment in which the clusters formed, we use the results as a new tool to study the formation of the inner GC system of the Galaxy. We achieve time-resolved insight into the evolution of the pre-MW gas cloud on short time-scales (a few hundred Myr) via cluster metallicities. The results are shown to be consistent with a contracting and self-gravitating cloud in which fluctuations in the pre-MW potential grow with time. An initially relatively smooth tidal-field evolved into a grainy potential within a dynamical time-scale of the collapsing cloud.

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Most globular clusters are spherical collections of ancient stars born not long after the universe began. At first, you might think globular clusters all look the same: just fuzzy balls in the eyepiece of your telescope. But look closer. Each differs in shape and structure, as distinct as a human face. And these clusters contain some of the oldest stars in the universe.

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Title: A Spitzer search for cold dust within globular clusters
Authors: P. Barmby, M.L. Boyer, C.E. Woodward, R.D. Gehrz, J. Th. van Loon, G.G. Fazio, M. Marengo, E. Polomski

Globular cluster stars evolving off the main sequence are known to lose mass, and it is expected that some of the lost material should remain within the cluster as an intracluster medium (ICM). Most attempts to detect such an ICM have been unsuccessful. The Multiband Imaging Photometer for Spitzer on the Spitzer Space Telescope was used to observe eight Galactic globular clusters in an attempt to detect the thermal emission from ICM dust. Most clusters do not have significant detections at 70 microns; one cluster, NGC 6341, has tentative evidence for the presence of dust, but 90 micron observations do not confirm the detection. Individual 70 micron point sources which appear in several of the cluster images are likely to be background galaxies. The inferred dust mass and upper limits are < 4e-4 solar masses, well below expectations for cluster dust production from mass loss in red and asymptotic giant branch stars. This implies that either globular cluster dust production is less efficient, or that ICM removal or dust destruction is more efficient, than previously believed. We explore several possibilities for ICM removal and conclude that present data do not yet permit us to distinguish between them.

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Astronomers investigate globular star cluster formation
An international group of astronomers has made a new discovery regarding the formation of globular star clusters. In their study, the scientists examined globular clusters outside the Milky Way Galaxy and found that they were most likely to form in dense areas. Their finding was recently published in The Astrophysical Journal.

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Title: An AKARI Search for Intracluster Dust of Globular Clusters
Authors: N. Matsunaga, H. Mito, Y. Nakada, H. Fukushi, T. Tanabé, Y. Ita, H. Izumiura, M. Matsuura, T. Ueta, I. Yamamura

We report the observations of 12 globular clusters with the AKARI/FIS. Our goal is to search for emission from the cold dust within clusters. We detect diffuse emissions toward NGC 6402 and 2808, but the IRAS 100-micron maps show the presence of strong background radiation. They are likely emitted from the galactic cirrus, while we cannot rule out the possible association of a bump of emission with the cluster in the case of NGC 6402. We also detect 28 point-like sources mainly in the WIDE-S images (90 micron). At least several of them are not associated with the clusters but background galaxies based on some external catalogues. We present the SEDs by combining the near-and-mid infrared data obtained with the IRC if possible. The SEDs suggest that most of the point sources are background galaxies. We find one candidate of the intracluster dust which has no mid-infrared counterpart unlike the other point-like sources, although some features such as its point-like appearance should be explained before we conclude its intracluster origin. For most of the other clusters, we have confirmed the lack of the intracluster dust. We evaluate upper limits of the intracluster dust mass to be between 1.0E-05 and 1.0E-03 solar mass depending on the dust temperature. The lifetime of the intracluster dust inferred from the upper limits is shorter than 5 Myr (T=70K) or 50 Myr (35K). Such short lifetime indicates some mechanism(s) are at work to remove the intracluster dust. We also discuss its impact on the chemical evolution of globular clusters.

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NGC 2808
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Title: Combined Chandra, XMM-Newton and Hubble Space Telescope observations of the Galactic globular cluster NGC 2808
Authors: M. Servillat, A. Dieball, N. A. Webb, C. Knigge, R. Cornelisse, D. Barret, K. S. Long, M. M. Shara, D. R. Zurek

Using new Chandra X-ray observations and existing XMM-Newton X-ray and Hubble far ultraviolet observations, we aim to detect and identify the faint X-ray sources belonging to the Galactic globular cluster NGC 2808 in order to understand their role in the evolution of globular clusters. We present a Chandra X-ray observation of the Galactic globular cluster NGC 2808. We classify the X-ray sources associated with the cluster by analysing their colours and variability. Previous observations with XMM-Newton and far ultraviolet observations with the Hubble Space Telescope are re-investigated to help identify the Chandra sources associated with the cluster. We compare our results to population synthesis models and observations of other Galactic globular clusters. We detect 113 sources, of which 16 fall inside the half-mass radius of NGC 2808 and are concentrated towards the cluster core. From statistical analysis, these 16 sources are very likely to be linked to the cluster. We detect short-term (1 day) variability in X-rays for 7 sources, of which 2 fall inside the half-mass radius, and long-term (28 months) variability for 10 further sources, of which 2 fall inside the half-mass radius. Ultraviolet counterparts are found for 8 Chandra sources in the core, of which 2 have good matching probabilities and have ultraviolet properties expected for cataclysmic variables. We find one likely neutron star-quiescent low-mass X-ray binary and 7 cataclysmic variable candidates in the core of NGC 2808. The other 8 sources are cataclysmic variable candidates, but some could possibly be active binaries or millisecond pulsars. We find a possible deficit of X-ray sources compared to 47 Tuc which could be related to the metallicity content and the complexity of the evolution of NGC 2808.

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