Extra-tidal stars around globular clusters NGC 5024 and NGC 5053 and their chemical abundances

  • Published : 2018.10.10

Abstract

NGC 5024 and NGC 5053 are among the most metal-poor globular clusters in the Milky Way. Both globular clusters are considered to be accreted from dwarf galaxies (like Sagittarius dwarf galaxy or Magellanic clouds), and common stellar envelope and tidal tails between globular clusters are also detected. We present a search for extra-tidal cluster member candidates around these globular clusters from APOGEE survey data. Using 20 chemical elements (e.g., Fe, C, Mg, Al) and radial velocities, t-distributed stochastic neighbour embedding (t-SNE), which identifies an optimal mapping of a high-dimensional space into fewer dimensions, was explored, and we find that globular cluster stars are well separated from the field stars in 2-dimensional map from t-SNE. We also find that some stars selected in t-SNE map are placed outside of the tidal radius of the clusters. The proper motion of stars outside tidal radius is also comparable to that of globular clusters, which suggest that these stars are tidally decoupled from the globular clusters. We manually measure chemical abundances for the clusters and extra-tidal stars, and discuss the association of extra-tidal stars with the clusters.

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