English

Detecting metal-rich intermediate-age Globular Clusters in NGC 4570 using K-band photometry

Astrophysics 2009-12-04 v1

Abstract

Globular Cluster Systems (GCSs) of most early-type galaxies feature two peaks in their optical colour distributions. Blue-peak GCs are believed to be old and metal-poor, whereas the ages, metallicities, and the origin of the red-peak GCs are still being debated. We obtained deep K-band photometry and combined it with HST observations in g and z to yield a full SED from optical to near-infrared. This now allows us to break the age-metallicity degeneracy. We used our evolutionary synthesis models GALEV for star clusters to compute a large grid of models with different metallicities and a wide range of ages. Comparing these models to our observations revealed a large population of intermediate-age (1-3 Gyr) and metalrich (~ solar metallicity) globular clusters, that will give us further insights into the formation history of this galaxy.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0801.2318,
  title  = {Detecting metal-rich intermediate-age Globular Clusters in NGC 4570 using K-band photometry},
  author = {R. Kotulla and U. Fritze and P. Anders},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0801.2318},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

5 pages, 2 figures, to appear in Young Massive Star Clusters, eds. E. Perez, R. de Grijs, R. Gonzalez Delgado