Variable stars in Galactic globular clusters II. Population II Cepheids
Abstract
We identified a sample of 88 bona fide Population II Cepheids (henceforth referred to as Cepheids) and 44 candidates in Galactic globular clusters (GCs). Seventy-eight of the Cepheids in the sample align within of the period-luminosity relation for Milky Way Type II Cepheids (T2CEPs). Nine align with the period-luminosity relation for fundamental-mode anomalous Cepheids (ACEPs), and only one (BL Bo\"otis) follows the relation for first-overtone ACEPs, as determined from observations of ACEPs in the Large Magellanic Cloud. For sources in common between our catalog and the OGLE catalog, the classification agrees in 94% of cases. In comparison, for sources shared between the Gaia Specific Object Study (SOS) and OGLE, the agreement is 74%. In the dense environments of GCs, our analysis shows that the completeness of the Gaia catalogs for Cepheids is 64% for the SOS and 74% for the classifier of variable stars. We determined the red and blue edges of the instability strip for T2CEPs using linear MESA-RSP models. We find that the best-fit models, with and Z = 0.0003, are able to fit of the stars in our sample. This percentage is the same for helium abundances and . Higher values of lower this percentage, and the same effect is observed with lower values of . In the future, combining the sample of T2CEPs with the precise parallaxes obtained from GCs will strengthen the geometric calibration of a distance ladder based on Population II stars. This will be useful for determining distances within the Milky Way and for cross-checking distances to Local Group galaxies determined through other methods.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2502.18158,
title = {Variable stars in Galactic globular clusters II. Population II Cepheids},
author = {Mauricio Cruz Reyes and Richard I. Anderson and Susmita Das},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.18158},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
Accepted for publication in A&A