PHY637 Term Paper : Globular Clusters

Gaurav Dadwal
MS17182
April 2021

0.1 Introduction
Globular Clusters are one of the interesting and distinct objects found in
the universe. The first known Globular Cluster was discovered in 1665 by
Abraham Ihle. Thereafter many of them were discovered in 18th century
by many astronomers including Charles Messier and W. Herschel. These are
tightly bound clusters of stars usually spherical in shape with number of stars
ranging from 1000 to millions. Many of the Globular Clusters are found in
the Halo of the host Galaxies and some in the disc. Their location in the
galaxy halos makes them easier to spot owning to their early discovery.

Figure 1: Picture of the Globular Cluster NGC7006. Spherical shape and increas-
ing density towards the center are notable features

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Most of the stars in the Globular Clusters are found to be old stars with
lower metallicities. Color Magnitue Diagram (CMD) diagram of a typical
globular cluster looks like fig 2

Figure 2: We can see that lot of stars have gone off main sequence which suggests
GCs are old objects with no new star formation going on.

The ages of Globular Clusters range from 4 to 13 Gyrs which is in par

with the age of universe 13.8Gyrs from CMB. This makes them interesting
objects to study on many grounds, like they provide lower bound on the age
of the universe, also being the one of the oldest objects in the universe and
galaxy the process of their formation is thought to provide important insight
into the evolution of universe and espeacially formation of host galaxies.
In the following sections I’ll be reviewing the papers [1][2]. First I’ll talk
about the different methods of determining ages of Globular Clusters, then
discuss the Age Metallcity relations (AMR) for the Milky Way GCs which
were derived from these methods and an observation of bifurcation of diagram
into two parts above the metallicities [Fe/H] > -1.5 and its implications. In
the end we will see what these implications tell us about the evolution of
Milky Way galaxies and formation of Globular Clusters.

0.2 Determining Ages of Globular Clusters

As we have seen that determining ages of GCs is an interesting and important
task. There are many different methods for determination of ages of GCs. I

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will mention those which make use of main sequence turn off point to get an
estimate on ages of GCs. As we know that time spent on the main sequence
by a star is inversely related to its mass, assuming some initial mass function
for the cluster this implies that position of MSTO will indicate the age of
the cluster. Referring to fig 2, lower the turnoff point higher will be the age
of the cluster given some calibration is done.

(a) Figure from the paper show-

ing the fitting of isochrones to
the CMD of a Globular Cluster.
The difficulty in fitting is visible
and authors are applying some
shifting procedures to minimize
the errors due to fitting
(b) It shows the fit of a isochrone
to MSTO and theoretical ZAHB
to HB of a GC. The age is mea-
sured as the difference between
the two fits at the color of TO.

Figure 3: Showing the Methods of age determination of Globular Clusters

from [2]

0.2.1 Methods of Age Determination

1. Main Sequence Turn Off(MSTO) Isochrone Fitting
In this method, we first plot the stars of the globular cluster onto the
color magnitude diagram and then try to fit an isochrone to the turn
off point in the plotted CMD. Isochrone is theoretical evolution curve
of the cluster obtained from stellar evolution code by inputting some

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 initial mass function and the metallicity for the evolving cluster. It
represents the shape of the globular cluster CMD at any given age.
Idea is to fit an isochrone to the cluster CMD turn off and then age
associated with isochrone will be the estimated age of the Globular
Cluster. Major source of error in this method, author mentions is
that i.) The turnoff point is usually spread out so its difficult to fit an
isochrone to it. ii.) There is a degeneracy between the distance and age
as changing the distance to the cluster also changes the turnoff point
and this demands distances to GCs to be known with high accuracy.
The error associated with this method is 3Gyrs. However, there have
been many modifications to the method of fitting isochrones to get
better estimates.
TO
2. ∆VHB method
This is relative ageing method, It given the relative ages of the Globular
clusters. So, it requires the zero to be set from another techniques. In
this method also we fit an isochrone to the turoff point of cluster CMD
and also fit the theoretical ZAHB curve to the Horizontal Branch of the
cluster and then measure the absolute magnitude difference between
the horizontal branch fit and turn off point at the color of turn off.
As the turn off point shifts towards lower magnitudes (downwards)
with ageing while horizontal branch remains at same magnitude, the
distance between the two is also a measure of age of a globular cluster.
This method takes care of the distance measurement to the GC as both
HB and TO point shift with distance so distance to GC is not needed.
But the cost is relative age. Another advantage authors mention is
that this relative ageing method is less prone to uncertainities induced
due to metallicities as both TO point and HB shift in same direction in
response to metallicity changes. Authors have used more refined version
of this method (to decrease the error due to fitting) to determine the
ages of Globular Clusters in the Milky Way Galaxy.

0.3 Age Metallicity Relations(AMR) and

Implications
Age Metallicity relations refers to the plotting the stars of the clusters on
the Age-Metallicity plane. Ages of 75 GCs were estimated using the re-
TO
fined ∆VHB method mentioned in previous section. The Metallicities were

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taken from the spectroscopy data and Age-Metallicity Relation was plotted
as shown in fig 4
We can see from the AMR fig 4 that there is separation of halo and disc

Figure 4: The black and pink dots represent the halo and disc globular clusters re-
spectively. A clear bifurcation of diagram into two branches above the metallicites
of -1.5 is visible.

globular clusters on the AM plane. From this it is infered that Halo globular
clusters are metal poor than the disc clusters and two branches are referred
as metal poor (MP) and metal rich (MR) respectively.
To learn more about the GCs, authors plotted the known AMR of the Milky
Way and LMC, SMC over the derived GC AMR as shown in fig 5
The fig 5 immediately reveals the correlation between the AMRs of Milky
Way and disc Globular Clusters implying that disc Globular Clusters may
have formed in situ in the Milky Way Disc. And the overlap between the
AMR of magellanic clouds and halo globular clusters is not random but in-
ferred from the Mass Metallicity Relations of the MW Local group. The
off set in metallicity between the MP and MR branches is realised to be
aprroximately 0.6dex and from the Galactic Mass Metallicity relations this
translates to difference in stellar mass of about ∆logM∗ ∼ 2dex. Now taking
the mass of Milky Way disc to be ∼ (3 ± 1) × 1010 Msolar , It translates to
mass of ∼ 107−8 Msolar for the host galaxies of halo globular clusters. This
suggests the halo GCs might have formed in the dwarf galaxies having the

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Figure 5: AMR of LMC, SMC and are in dashed lines and AMR of stars of Milky
Way is in pink solid lines

masses in this range which corressponds with the masses of Large Magellanic
Cloud (LMC), SMC and WLM galaxy. This is further supported as men-
tioned earlier by the fig 5.
Thus,there is a strong correlation that the disc GCs are formed in situ in
the MW dics and that halo globular clusters might have come from dwarf
galaxies with masses in the range ∼ 107−8 Msolar accreting into the milky way
halo, but this only makes sense if the number of globular clusters found in
the halo are consistent with the evolution history of milky way.

0.4 Evolution of Milky Way and Formation of Globu-

lar Clusters
To confirm the guess about the origin of halo globular clusters from the dwarf
galaxies, author performs the N body simulation of the evolution of Milky
Way halo to check whether the GCs and stellar mass of MW halo would
have been accreted self-consistently. To do this requires the estimate of the
number of dwarfs of given mass which merge with the milky way sized halo
and how many globular clusters do each dwarf galaxy contributes, which is
referred as specific SN frequency of the GCs(it is the normalised frequency of
GCs in the galaxy based on the galaxy luminosity) . The number of subhaloes

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of dark matter mass m which merge with the larger galaxy of mass M is given
by the function below,
Z
Nmerged (m) = A m−1.8 dm

And then corressponding the stellar mass accreted is obtained by using the
Stellar to halo mass relation (SHMR). Using these procedure, it is possible to
compute the number of dwarf galaxies of given stellar mass that merge with
the milky way and number of globular clusters they contribute assuming the
specific SN for the GCs.
The N body simulation were performed and cumulative stellar mass accreted
by milky way and cumulative number of dwarfs and GCs merged were noted
as shown in fig 6

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Figure 6: The plot shows the cumulative stellar mass accreted in the milky way
disc with the cumulative number of dwarf and GCs merged. The solid line shows
the accreted stellar mass in the halo vs the number of dwarf galaxies and the dotted
lines show the number of GCs as a function of cumulative stellar mass accreted in
MW for specific SN frequencies. The blue dot represents the present number of
GCs and stellar mass of milky way halo, showing the correspondence with SN = 7

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Figure 7: The figure shows the number of GCs contributed by M* mass dwarfs
and number of dwarfs of dwarfs accreted of a given stellar mass ( note the de-
creasing function ). The dotted lines show the GCs for specific SN frequencies,
SN = 1, 5, 10, 20 and the colored dotted lines are for mass dependent SN rela-
tions(frequency dependent of mass of progenator galaxy). The bands shows the
position of WLM, SMC and LMC respectively.

The simulation results support the self consistent accretion of stellar mass
halo and GCs from the dwarf galaxies. To further see which galaxies might
be responsible for contributing the globular clusters, authors again overlap
the number of GCs and masses of previously used SMC, LMC and WLM
as shown in fig 7. The number of accumulated GCs can be calculated as
product of Nmerged and the corresponding SN frequency. It is noted that MW
can accumulate ∼4 GCs from three WLM sized mergers and ∼35 GCs from
LMC sized mergers.

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Figure 8: The black histogram shows the number of GCs from the derived mass
of progenator galaxy from AMR offset using MMR. The red and blue curves show
the simulation results using the mass dependent GC frequency and pink curve is
for fixed SN = 7 which was found consistent in fig 5

Another confirming analysis was done by authors by assuming the simple

MMR(mass metallicity relation) for the dwarf galaxies. The offset of metal-
licity from the MR branch was associated with the corressponding mass of
the progenator dwarf galaxy using the Galactic MMR and then number of
GCs found at that offset (fig 4) were plotted against the progenator mass
derived as shown in fig 8. Now, to confirm the consistency with the MW
accretion evolution, the plot was overlapped with the corressponding results
from the simulations. The overlap was found positive for the mass dependent
SN frequency while fixed SN = 7 provided a deviation at larger progenator
masses which was expected.
Thus, the dwarf galaxies progenators are likely the birth environments of the
halo GCs.

0.5 Conclusions
The reviewed paper noted the bifurcation of AMR of the GCs using the
refined methods of Age determination of GCs. The correlation found relating
the formation of MR and MP GCs in the in-situ disc of galaxy and from the

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dwarf galaxies of mass range ∼ 107−8 Msolar were tested using the N body
simulations of the MW accretion history and were found consistent. Thus,
the halo GCs are most likely to be formed along the evolution of milky way
halo from the accretion of dwarf galaxies in the galaxy dark matter halo.

0.6 References
1.] https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/436/1/122/971333
2.] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0004-637X/775/2/134
3.] https://www.pnas.org/content/95/1/13
4.] All figures are taken from [2] except 2-3 which were taken from [1].

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