The CN-CH positive correlation in the globular cluster NGC 5286

  • Lim, Dongwook (Center for Galaxy Evolution Research & Department of Astronomy, Yonsei University) ;
  • Hong, Seungsoo (Center for Galaxy Evolution Research & Department of Astronomy, Yonsei University) ;
  • Lee, Young-Wook (Center for Galaxy Evolution Research & Department of Astronomy, Yonsei University)
  • 발행 : 2017.04.10

초록

We performed low-resolution spectroscopy for the red giant stars in the Galactic globular cluster (GC) NGC 5286, which is known to show intrinsic heavy element variations. We found that these stars are clearly divided into two subpopulations by CN index. These two subpopulations also show significant differences in the HK'and CH indices, where the CN-strong stars are more enhanced in both indices. From the comparison with high-resolution spectroscopic data of Marino et al. (2015), we found that the CN- and HK'-strong stars are also increased in the abundances of s-process elements and Fe. It appears that, therefore, these stars are later generation stars probably affected by supernova enrichment. In addition, NGC 5286 shows the CN-CH positive correlation among the whole sample, which is only discovered in the GCs with heavy element variations such as M22 and NGC 6273. Therefore, these results strengthen our previous suggestion that the CN-CH positive correlation may be associated with the heavy element variations in the GCs.

키워드