A CATALOG OF GLOBULAR CLUSTER SYSTEMS: WHAT DETERMINES THE SIZE OF A GALAXY'S GLOBULAR CLUSTER POPULATION?

By W. Harris, G. Harris, M. Alessi. 2013

166 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present a catalog of 422 galaxies with published measurements of their globular cluster (GC) populations. Of these, 248 are E galaxies, 93 are S0 galaxies, and 81 are spirals or irregulars. Among various correlations of the total number of GCs with other global galaxy properties, we find that NGC correlates well though nonlinearly with the dynamical mass of the galaxy bulge , where σe is the central velocity dispersion and Re the effective radius of the galaxy light profile. We also present updated versions of the GC specific frequency SN and specific mass SM versus host galaxy luminosity and baryonic mass. These graphs exhibit the previously known U-shape: highest SN or SM values occur for either dwarfs or supergiants, but in the midrange of galaxy size (109–1010 L☉) the GC numbers fall along a well-defined baseline value of SN ≃ 1 or SM = 0.1, similar among all galaxy types. Along with other recent discussions, we suggest that this trend may represent the effects of feedback, which systematically inhibited early star formation at either very low or very high galaxy mass, but which had its minimum effect for intermediate masses. Our results strongly reinforce recent proposals that GC formation efficiency appears to be most nearly proportional to the galaxy halo mass Mhalo. The mean “absolute” efficiency ratio for GC formation that we derive from the catalog data is MGCS/Mhalo = 6 × 10−5. We suggest that the galaxy-to-galaxy scatter around this mean value may arise in part because of differences in the relative timing of GC formation versus field-star formation. Finally, we find that an excellent empirical predictor of total GC population for galaxies of all luminosities is NGC ∼ (Reσe)1.3, a result consistent with fundamental plane scaling relations.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b45e9ef2320a183e36c02e278de12bb71a7c7e2f

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Astronomy and Astrophysics

In Electrical and Electronic Engineering

In Instrumentation

Citations in the corpus

DYNAMICAL FORMATION OF THE GW150914 BINARY BLACK HOLE (2016, background): “…GCs in the universe, which we assume to be -0.77 Mpc 3, with an optimistic value of -2.31 Mpc 3 and a pessimistic value of -0.32 Mpc 3 based on recent measurements of galaxy luminosity functions (Kelvin et al. 2014) and the correlation between galaxy luminosity and GC number (Harris et al. 2013).”
GALAXIES AT THE EXTREMES: ULTRA-DIFFUSE GALAXIES IN THE VIRGO CLUSTER (2015, background): “If globular cluster populations trace the dark matter content of a galaxy (e.g., Blakeslee et al. 1997; Peng et al. 2008; Harris et al. 2013; Hudson et al. 2014), the high specific frequency we infer for VLSB-B may be a signature of a massive dark halo that protects the system from rapid tidal…”
A HIGH STELLAR VELOCITY DISPERSION AND ∼100 GLOBULAR CLUSTERS FOR THE ULTRA-DIFFUSE GALAXY DRAGONFLY 44 (2016, background): “The luminosity function of globular clusters is wellapproximated by a Gaussian (Harris et al. 2013), with a turnover magnitude of mV,cen ≈ 27.5 at the distance of Coma (Miller & Lotz 2007; Lee & Jang 2016; Peng & Lim 2016).”
CO-EVOLUTION OF GALACTIC NUCLEI AND GLOBULAR CLUSTER SYSTEMS (2013, methodology): “For globular clusters, Spitler & Forbes (2009) and Harris et al. (2013) showed thatMGC ≈ 6× 10−5 Mh across four orders of magnitude in galaxy mass (this scaling was first predicted in theoretical models using cosmological simulations by Kravtsov & Gnedin 2005).”