A catalogue of masses, structural parameters, and velocity dispersion profiles of 112 Milky Way globular clusters

By H. Baumgardt, Michael Hilker. 2018

322 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We have determined masses, stellar mass functions, and structural parameters of 112 Milky Way globular clusters by fitting a large set of N-body simulations to their velocity dispersion and surface density profiles. The velocity dispersion profiles were calculated based on a combination of more than 15000 high-precision radial velocities which we derived from archival ESO/VLT and Keck spectra together with similar to 20000 published radial velocities from the literature. Our fits also include the stellar mass functions of the globular clusters, which are available for 47 clusters in our sample, allowing us to self-consistently take the effects of mass segregation and ongoing cluster dissolution into account. We confirm the strong correlation between the global mass functions of globular clusters and their relaxation times recently found by Sollima & Baumgardt (2017). We also find a correlation of the escape velocity from the centre of a globular cluster and the fraction of first generation stars (FG) in the cluster recently derived for 57 globular clusters by Milone et al. (2017), but no correlation between the FG star fraction and the global mass function of a globular cluster. This could indicate that the ability of a globular cluster to keep the wind ejecta from the polluting star(s) is the crucial parameter determining the presence and fraction of second-generation stars and not its later dynamical mass loss.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/86f3bb8b4ee5db73c9d718d6ba73e5623de3f485

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

Citations in the corpus

Modeling Dense Star Clusters in the Milky Way and Beyond with the CMC Cluster Catalog (2019, methodology): “We show comparisons to Baumgardt & Hilker (2018) simply because that analysis quotes total cluster masses directly (as opposed to V-band magnitudes), which circumvents the need to assume a massto-light ratio in order to obtain cluster masses.”
The Spur and the Gap in GD-1: Dynamical Evidence for a Dark Substructure in the Milky Way Halo (2018, background): “Dwarf galaxies are shown as light squares (McConnachie 2012), globular clusters as medium triangles (Baumgardt & Hilker 2018), and outerdisk molecular clouds (beyond 10 kpc) as dark circles (MivilleDeschênes et al. 2017).”
Mean proper motions, space orbits, and velocity dispersion profiles of Galactic globular clusters derived fromGaiaDR2 data (2018, methodology): “For these clusters the mass functions were estimated from the relation between half-mass relaxation time TRH and α found by Baumgardt & Hilker (2018): α = 8.23 − 0.95 log10 TRH .”
Clusters and mirages: cataloguing stellar aggregates in the Milky Way (2019, background): “Dispersions in the core of globular clusters typically reach 5–10 km s−1 (e.g. Pryor et al. 1993; Lapenna et al. 2015; Baumgardt & Hilker 2018).”