English

Variable stars in Galactic globular clusters II. Population II Cepheids

Solar and Stellar Astrophysics 2025-02-26 v1 Astrophysics of Galaxies

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 2σ2\,\sigma 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 M=0.6MM = 0.6\,{\rm M}_\odot and Z = 0.0003, are able to fit 9090% of the stars in our sample. This percentage is the same for helium abundances Y=0.220Y = 0.220 and 0.2450.245. Higher values of YY lower this percentage, and the same effect is observed with lower values of ZZ. 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

R2 v1 2026-06-28T21:57:15.569Z