Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy
Scientific paper
May 2007
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2007aas...210.1604k&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society Meeting 210, #16.04; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 39, p.116
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astronomy
Scientific paper
We determine the chemical abundances of 19 red giant branch stars in the Galactic globular cluster NGC 2419. Lying at a distance of 84.2 kpc and a galactocentric distance of 91.5 kpc, NGC 2419 is the fourth brightest globular cluster in the Milky Way with a total magnitude of M_V = -9.6 mag, which is significantly brighter than M_V = -7.5 mag, the typical peak of the globular cluster luminosity functions in external galaxies. Our results will give an insight of whether NGC 2419 is in fact a globular cluster or a core of a disrupted galaxy that merged with the Milky Way. We have used IRAF to reduce spectra we have taken with the DEIMOS spectrograph on the the Keck I 10-meter telescope. Using the strengths of the Ca II triplet absorption lines at approximately 8600 Angstrom, we will determine the chemical abundance of each star. If the chemical abundances differ by significantly more than the observational errors would predict then we can conclude the cluster is a remnant of the core of a galaxy that merged with the Milky Way and not a normal globular cluster, because most globular clusters formed quickly from a well mixed gas cloud, and thus their stars have nearly identical ages and chemical compositions. We gratefully acknowledge financial support from a UROP grant to SK and NSF grant AST-0307863 to TSH. These data were obtained at the Keck Observatory, operated by the California Inst. of Technology, Univ. of California and NASA and made possible by generous financial support from the W.M. Keck Foundation.
Bosler Tammy
Kadakia Shimonee
Smecker-Hane Tammy
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