Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astrophysics
Scientific paper
2005-08-09
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astrophysics
18 pages, 13 figures. Accepted for publication in ApJ. Also available at http://www.physics.rutgers.edu/~pcote/acs/publication
Scientific paper
10.1086/497092
We have measured half-light radii, r_h, for globular clusters (GCs) belonging to the 100 early-type galaxies observed in the ACS Virgo Cluster Survey and the elliptical galaxy NGC 4697. An analysis of the dependencies of the measured r_h on both the properties of the GCs themselves and their host galaxies reveals that the average r_h increases with increasing galactocentric distance or, alternatively, with decreasing galaxy surface brightness. For the first time, we find that the average r_h decreases with the host galaxy color. We also show that there is no evidence for a variation of r_h with the luminosity of the GCs. Finally, we find in agreement with previous observations that the average r_h depends on the color of GCs, with red GCs being ~17% smaller than their blue counterparts. We show that this difference is probably a consequence of an intrinsic mechanism, rather than projection effects, and that it is in good agreement with the mechanism proposed in Jordan (2004). We discuss these findings in light of two simple pictures for the origin of the r_h of GCs and show that both lead to a behavior in rough agreement with the observations. After accounting for the dependencies found we show that the average GC half-light radii
Blakeslee John P.
Cote' Patrick
Ferrarese Laura
Jord'an Andrés
McLaughlin Dean E.
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