Outer density profiles of 19 Galactic globular clusters from deep and wide-field imaging

Details Outer density profiles of 19 Galactic globular clusters from deep and wide-field imaging Outer density profiles of 19 Galactic globular clusters from deep and wide-field imaging

2011-08-19

arxiv.org/abs/1108.4018v2

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astrophysics

Galaxy Astrophysics

17 pages, 14 figures, 2 tables; accepted for publication in MNRAS

Scientific paper

Using deep photometric data from WFC@INT and WFI@ESO2.2m we measure the outer number density profiles of 19 stellar clusters located in the inner region of the Milky Way halo (within a Galactocentric distance range of 10-30 kpc) in order to assess the impact of internal and external dynamical processes on the spatial distribution of stars. Adopting power-law fitting templates, with index $-\gamma$ in the outer region, we find that the clusters in our sample can be divided in two groups: a group of massive clusters ($ \ge 10^5 $ M_sun) that has relatively flat profiles with $2.5 < \gamma < 4$ and a group of low-mass clusters ($ \le 10^5 $ M_sun), with steep profiles ($\gamma > 4$) and clear signatures of interaction with the Galactic tidal field. We refer to these two groups as 'tidally unaffected' and 'tidally affected', respectively. Our results also show a clear trend between the slope of the outer parts and the half-mass density of these systems, which suggests that the outer density profiles may retain key information on the dominant processes driving the dynamical evolution of Globular Clusters.

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