Proper motion of Galactic globular cluster NGC 104

  • Published : 2010.10.06

Abstract

Globular clusters (GCs) are known to be one of the oldest objects in the Milky Way. Therefore the dynamical informations of GCs are very important to understand the formation and evolution of our Galaxy. Motion of GCs in the halo of Galaxy can be traced by radial velocities of individual stars and proper motions of GCs. Measuring the radial velocities of stars in GCs has been challenging for decades because the brightness of stars (even for the brightest stars) in GCs are too faint (V>14) to measure the radial velocities. The available large telescopes (D>4m) enable us to observe the spectra of stars in the red giant branch of GCs, and it is now more plausible to measure the radial velocities of stars in GCs. On the contrary it is still very difficult to measure the sky-projected two-dimensional motion of GCs in Galaxy even with the large telescopes because the distance to GCs is quite large (~10kpc) compared to the spatial resolution of present-day large ground-based telescopes. Instruments on-board Hubble Space Telescope are ideal to study the proper motion of GCs thanks to their extremely high spatial resolution (~0.05arcsec). We report a study of proper motion of NGC 104, one of the most metal-rich Milky Way GCs, based-on archival images of NGC 104 observed using HST/ACS. Using the stars in Small Magellanic Cloud as reference coordinate, we are able to measure the proper motions of individual stars in NGC 104 with a high precision. We discuss the internal dynamics of stars in NGC 104 by comparing proper motion results based-on shorter (<1yr) and longer (~7yrs) time durations.

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