English

Kinematics and Metallicities of Globular Clusters in M104

Astrophysics 2016-08-30 v1

Abstract

We have obtained spectra for globular cluster candidates in M104 with LDSS-2 on the William Herschel Telescope, confirming 34 objects as M104 globular clusters. We find a cluster velocity dispersion of \sim 260 km/sec, and the Projected Mass Estimator gives a mass of 5.0 (3.5,6.7) ×1011\times 10^{11} M_\odot for M104 within a projected radius of 330\sim 330^{''} (14 kpc for D=8.55 Mpc). Our best estimate for the mass-to-light ratio is M/LVT_{V_T}= 165.0+5.5^{+5.5}_{-5.0} within the same radius. Considering all of the possible sources of uncertainty, we find a lower limit of M/L_V= 5.3, which is larger than the M/LV_V found from rotation curve analyses inside 180^{''}. We thus conclude that the mass-to-light ratio increases with radius, or in other words that M104 possesses a dark matter halo. There is a marginal detection of rotation in the M104 cluster system at the 92.5% confidence level; larger samples will be needed to investigate this possibility. Interestingly, the M104 globular cluster and planetary nebulae (PNe) kinematics are roughly consistent inside 100\sim 100^{''}. Finally, we find a mean cluster metallicity of [Fe/H] = -0.70 ±\pm 0.3, which is more typical of clusters in gE/cD galaxies than it is of clusters in other spirals.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.astro-ph/9609176,
  title  = {Kinematics and Metallicities of Globular Clusters in M104},
  author = {T. J. Bridges and K. M. Ashman and S. E. Zepf and D. Carter and D. A. Hanes and R. M. Sharples and J. J. Kavelaars},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:astro-ph/9609176},
  year   = {2016}
}

Comments

11 pages, latex, 7 figures. Figures embedded into postscript file. Accepted (August 1996) for publication in MNRAS