Multiple Stellar Populations of Galactic Globular Clusters NGC 6656 and NGC 6723

  • Published : 2011.10.05

Abstract

Deep Ca,b,y images obtained from the CTIO 4m Blaco telescope are used to investigate the multiple stellar populations of red giant branch (RGB) and sub-giant branch (SGB) in Galactic globular clusters NGC 6656 and NGC 6723. For NGC 6656, confirming the result of Lee et al. (2009), we find two discrete populations of the RGB stars of which mean color separation is about 0.2 mag in hk[=(Ca-b)-(b-y)] index. Furthermore, we also find the bimodel distribution of the SGB stars in (hk, y) color-magnitude diagram. A new finding is that the (hk, y) color-magnitude diagram of NGC 6723 shows two distinct RGB stars with different calcium abundances of which mean color separation is about 0.12 mag in hk index. This multiple stellar feature has not been observed in previous observation, suggesting that NGC 6723 may also be a possible relic of dwarf galaxies that merged into the Milky Way in the past. Thus our result adds further constraints to the merging scenario of the Galaxy formation. Unfortunately, the split of SGB stars in NGC 6723 is not obvious. We will present some statistical results to compare properties of two populations in two clusters.

Keywords