English

Formation of Multiple Populations of M5 (NGC 5904)

Astrophysics of Galaxies 2021-09-29 v1 Solar and Stellar Astrophysics

Abstract

With our new Ca-CN-CH-NH photometry, we revisit the globular cluster (GC) M5. We find that M5 is a mono-metallic GC with a small metallicity dispersion. Our carbon abundances show that the σ\sigma[C/Fe] of the M5 CN-s population, with depleted carbon and enhanced nitrogen abundances, is significantly large for a single stellar population. Our new analysis reveals that the M5 CN-s population is well described by the two stellar populations: the CN-sI_{\rm I}, being the major CN-s component, with the intermediate carbon and nitrogen abundance and the CN-sE_{\rm E} with the most carbon-poor and nitrogen-rich abundance. We find that the CN-sE_{\rm E} is significantly more centrally concentrated than the others, while CN-w and CN-sI_{\rm I} have similar cumulative radial distributions. The red giant branch bump VV magnitude, the helium abundance barometer in mono-metallic populations, of individual populations appears to be correlated with their mean carbon abundance, indicating that carbon abundances are anticorrelated with helium abundances. We propose that the CN-sE_{\rm E} formed out of gas that experienced proton-capture processes at high temperatures in the innermost region of the proto-GC of M5 that resided in a dense ambient density environment. Shortly after, the CN-sI_{\rm I} formed out of gas diluted from the pristine gas in the more spatially extended region, consistent with the current development of numerical simulations by others.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2108.13756,
  title  = {Formation of Multiple Populations of M5 (NGC 5904)},
  author = {Jae-Woo Lee},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2108.13756},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

The Astrophysical Journal Letters (in press)