Related papers: The Formation of Globular Cluster Systems
We have carried out a search for substructure within the globular cluster systems of M84 (NGC 4374) and M86 (NGC 4406), two giant elliptical galaxies in the Virgo Cluster. We use wide-field (36 arcmin x 36 arcmin), multi-color broadband…
Detailed observations of globular clusters (GCs) have revealed evidence of self-enrichment: some of the heavy elements that we see in stars today were produced by cluster stars themselves. Moreover, GCs have internal subpopulations with…
Globular clusters are compact, gravitationally bound systems of up to a million stars. The GCs in the Milky Way contain some of the oldest stars known, and provide important clues to the early formation and continuing evolution of our…
We discuss some of the key open questions regarding the formation and evolution of globular clusters (GCs) during galaxy formation and assembly within a cosmological framework. The current state-of-the-art for both observations and…
We discuss the existence of a mass-metallicity relation among galactic halo globular clusters. The lack of any luminosity-metallicity correlation in globular cluster systems has been used as an argument against self-enrichment models of…
The halo and disc globular cluster population can be used as a tracer of the primordial epochs of the Milky Way formation. In this work, literature data of globular clusters ages, chemical abundances, and structural parameters are studied,…
Globular clusters trace the formation history of the spheroidal components of both our Galaxy and others, which represent the bulk of star formation over the history of the universe. They also exhibit a range of metallicities, with…
A review of the present observational and theoretical status of elliptical galaxies is presented with the aim to clarify whether the monolithic or the hierarchical, is a more viable scenario for the origin of these structures. We describe…
With the ultimate aim of distinguishing between various models describing the formation of galaxy halos (e.g. radial or multi-phase collapse, random mergers), we have completed a spectroscopic study of the globular cluster system of M31. We…
We studied the properties of the globular cluster systems of five early--type galaxies in the Fornax galaxy cluster: NGC 1374, NGC 1379, NGC 1387, NGC 1427, and the central giant elliptical NGC 1399. From the investigation of their number…
We discuss the present state of knowledge and thought concerning the spread in age found among Galactic globular clusters, with some discussion of the implications for what happened during the earliest stages of the formation of the Milky…
A subset of 150 globular clusters in M87 has been selected on the basis of S/N ratio for abundance and age determinations from the sample of Paper I. Indices measuring the strength of the strongest spectral features were determined for the…
The global properties of all known Galactic globular clusters are examined. The relationship between the luminosities and the metallicities of Galactic globular clusters is found to be complex. Among luminous clusters there is a correlation…
We review the properties of globular clusters which make them useful for studying the Galactic halo, Galactic chemical evolution, and the early stages of the formation of the Milky Way. We review the evidence that GCs have a chemical…
We examine whether the super star-forming clumps (R~1-3 kpc; M~10^8-10^9.5 Msun) now known to be a key component of star-forming galaxies at z~2 could be the formation sites of the locally observed old globular cluster population. We find…
The last decade of research on elliptical galaxies has produced a wealth of new information concerning both their detailed structure and their global scaling relations. We review the old and new results about isophote shapes and…
Globular cluster (GC) systems around galaxies of a vast mass range show remarkably simple scaling relations. The combined mass of all GCs is a constant fraction of the total galaxy mass and the mean metallicity and metallicity dispersion of…
We analyze the structural parameters of the largest-available sample of spatially resolved extragalactic globular clusters. The images of M31 GCs were found in a search of HST archival data, described in a companion paper. We measure the…
Updated data of the 153 Galactic globular clusters are used to readdress fundamental parameters of the Milky Way. We build a reduced sample, decontaminated of the clusters younger than 10Gyr, those with retrograde orbits and/or evidence of…
Globular clusters (GCs) are among the oldest and densest stellar systems in the Universe, yet how they form remains a mystery. Here we present a suite of cosmological simulations in which both dark-matter-free GCs and dark-matter-rich dwarf…