The Kinematics and Metallicity of the M31 Globular Cluster System
By K. Perrett, T. Bridges, D. Hanes, M. Irwin, J. Brodie, D. Carter, J. Huchra, F. Watson. 2002
138 citations recorded by the source corpus.
With the ultimate aim of distinguishing between various models describing the formation of galaxy halos (e.g., radial or multiphase collapse and random mergers), we have completed a spectroscopic study of the globular cluster system of M31. We present the results of deep intermediate-resolution fiber-optic spectroscopy of several hundred of the M31 globular clusters using the Wide Field Fibre Optic Spectrograph at the William Herschel Telescope in La Palma, Canary Islands. These observations have yielded precise radial velocities (±12 km s-1) and metallicities (±0.26 dex) for over 200 members of the M31 globular cluster population out to a radius of 1.°5 from the galaxy center. Many of these clusters have no previous published radial velocity or [Fe/H] estimates, and the remainder typically represent significant improvements over earlier determinations. We present analyses of the spatial, kinematic, and metal abundance properties of the M31 globular clusters. We find that the abundance distribution of the cluster system is consistent with a bimodal distribution with peaks at [Fe/H] ∼ -1.4 and -0.5. The metal-rich clusters demonstrate a centrally concentrated spatial distribution with a high rotation amplitude, although this population does not appear significantly flattened and is consistent with a bulge population. The metal-poor clusters tend to be less spatially concentrated and are also found to have a strong rotation signature.
Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/47823338cf13ac3e9d2735ad944f194f4b12c239
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In Astronomy and Astrophysics
Citations in the corpus
- 2MASS NIR photometry for 693 candidate globular clusters in M 31 and the Revised Bologna Catalogue (2003, background): “…candidates G268, B409, G355 and B140 have been classified as galaxies by Racine (1991), based on high resolution ground based imaging, while Federici et al. (1990); Huchra et al. (1991); Perrett et al. (2002) classified them as globular clusters on the basis of spectroscopical observations.”
- The Detailed Star Formation History in the Spheroid, Outer Disk, and Tidal Stream of the Andromeda Galaxy (2006, background): “It is also clear that the spheroid velocity distribution is not as hot as one would expect for a hot halo, nor does it reflect the kinematics of the halo globular cluster system (σ∼ 150 km s−1; Perrett et al. 2002).”
- Extragalactic Globular Clusters and Galaxy Formation (2006, background): “From their kinematic and metallicity study, Perrett et al. (2002) found that only ∼ 25% of a sample of ∼ 300 GCs belong to the metal-rich (bulge) peak, compared to one third in the Galaxy.”