Multiple populations in globular clusters

By R. Gratton, E. Carretta, A. Bragaglia. 2012

587 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Recent progress in studies of globular clusters has shown that they are not simple stellar populations, but rather are made up of multiple generations. Evidence stems both from photometry and spectroscopy. A new paradigm is arising for the formation of massive star clusters, which includes several episodes of star formation. While this provides an explanation for several features of globular clusters, including the second-parameter problem, it also opens new perspectives on the relation between globular clusters and the halo of our Galaxy, and by extension on all populations with a high specific frequency of globular clusters, such as, e.g., giant elliptical galaxies. We review progress in this area, focussing on the most recent studies. Several points remain to become properly understood, in particular those concerning the nature of the polluters producing the abundance pattern in the clusters and the typical timescale, the range of cluster masses where this phenomenon is active, and the relation between globular clusters and other satellites of our Galaxy.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/53c00e54f380b9548ca271a101d30b0a380c2c8b

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Citations in the corpus

MESA ISOCHRONES AND STELLAR TRACKS (MIST). I. SOLAR-SCALED MODELS (2016, background): “The spread in abundances found in globular clusters has been proposed to be a signature of self-enrichment through multiple generations of stellar populations (Kraft 1994; Gratton et al. 2004; D’Antona & Caloi 2008; Piotto et al. 2012; Gratton et al. 2012).”
CHEMICAL TAGGING CAN WORK: IDENTIFICATION OF STELLAR PHASE-SPACE STRUCTURES PURELY BY CHEMICAL-ABUNDANCE SIMILARITY (2016, methodology): “That is, although they often show chemical diversity, that chemical diversity is small, and follows well-defined trends or a subspace in abundance space (for example, Gratton et al. 2012; Mészáros et al. 2015; Bovy 2015, and references within those).”
J-PLUS: The Javalambre Photometric Local Universe Survey (2015, background): “…J-PLUS will build a formidable legacy data set by delivering low resolution spectroscopy for every pixel over a large, con- 17 Multiple stellar populations have been detected in a large fraction of galactic globular clusters (see e.g. Gratton et al. 2012, Bastian 2015). tiguous area of the sky.”
A stellar census in globular clusters with MUSE: multiple populations chemistry in NGC 2808 (2019, methodology): “C anticorrelations (see reviews by Gratton et al. 2004, 2012).”
The Updated BaSTI Stellar Evolution Models and Isochrones. I. Solar-scaled Calculations (2018, background): “Metal mixtures appropriate to study the multiple populations phenomenon in globular clusters (see, Gratton et al. 2012; Cassisi & Salaris 2013; Piotto et al. 2015, and references therein) will be presented in future publications.”
Target Selection for the SDSS-IV APOGEE-2 Survey (2017, background): “…this past century, surprises do continue to this day, for example, with the discoveries of the X-shaped bulge in the center (McWilliam & Zoccali 2010; Nataf et al. 2010; Ness & Lang 2016) and the presence of multiple stellar populations in globular clusters (e.g., Piotto 2009; Gratton et al. 2012).”
Our astrochemical heritage (2012, background): “For example, at large scale, the chemical enrichment in stars throughout the Milky Way tells us about different star populations and ages, and, consequently, how the Milky Way formed (e.g., Gratton et al. 2012).”