Detection of Massive Tidal Tails around the Globular Cluster Palomar 5 with Sloan Digital Sky Survey Commissioning Data

By M. Odenkirchen, E. Grebel, C. Rockosi, W. Dehnen, R. Ibata, Hans-Walter Rix, A. Stolte, Christian Wolf, John E. Anderson, Jr., N. Bahcall and 10 more. 2000

169 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We report the discovery of two well-defined tidal tails emerging from the sparse remote globular cluster Palomar 5. These tails stretch out symmetrically to both sides of the cluster in the direction of constant Galactic latitude and subtend an angle of 2.°6 on the sky. The tails have been detected in commissioning data of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, providing deep five-color photometry in a 2.°5-wide band along the equator. The stars in the tails make up a substantial part (~) of the current total population of cluster stars in the magnitude interval 19.5 ≤ i* ≤ 22.0. This reveals that the cluster is subject to heavy mass loss. The orientation of the tails provides an important key for the determination of the cluster's Galactic orbit.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3e54bf26f23f082fb6092b545b2f5211d43f478f

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Citations in the corpus

The stellar halo of the Galaxy (2008, background): “Narrow streams have been detected around globular clusters (Grillmair et al. 1995), the most spectacular examples being Pal 5 (Odenkirchen et al. 2001) and NGC5466 (Grillmair & Johnson 2006; Belokurov et al. 2006a).”
Luminosity function and radial distribution of Milky Way satellites in a ΛCDM Universe (2009, background): “…detect the presence of a significant dark population of subhaloes in the MW halo could come from the signatures of the interaction of such a population with the thin stellar streams in the MW halo ( e.g. Odenkirchen et al. 2001, Ibata et al. 2002, Johnston et al. 2002, Grillmair & Dionatos 2006).”
Tidal tails of star clusters (2009, background): “Since an increasing number of tidal structures are being discovered around the Milky Way (e.g. Odenkirchen et al. 2001; Belokurov et al. 2006; Grillmair & Dionatos 2006; Grillmair 2009; Jurić et al. 2008; Keller, Da Costa & Prior 2009; Koch et al. 2009), there is a profound interest for a deeper…”
Uncovering cold dark matter halo substructure with tidal streams (2001, background): “With a limiting magnitude of V ∼ 21, the GAIA measurements will easily reach down to the horizontal branch at 100 kpc. Placing all of the stream at a distance of d = 100 kpc, we expect ∼ 1600 stars for V > 21 per 106 M⊙ of progenitor mass (assuming the luminosity function of the Draco by Odenkirchen”
Comparing the properties of local globular cluster systems: implications for the formation of the Galactic halo (2004, background): “5 (rc = 21.93 pc) has been found to possess massive tidal tails (Odenkirchen et al. 2001; Odenkirchen et al. 2002; Odenkirchen et al. 2003; Rockosi et al. 2002), and is hence inthe process of being tidally disrupted.”
The Lives of Stars: Insights from the TGAS–RAVE–LAMOST Data Set (2018, background): “…counts, as is the case for stellar streams formed both by the infall of large galaxies (e.g. the Sagittarius dwarf spheroidal; Ibata et al. 1994, Hernitschek et al. 2017) and small systems (e.g. the tidal tails around the globular cluster Palomar-5; Odenkirchen et al. 2001, Erkal et al. 2017).”