• Title/Summary/Keyword: galactic bulge

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The Globular Cluster NGC 6273: Another Candidate for the Milky Way Building Blocks

  • Lim, Dongwook;Han, Sang-Il;Lee, Young-Wook
    • The Bulletin of The Korean Astronomical Society
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    • v.40 no.2
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    • pp.40.2-40.2
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    • 2015
  • In our recent investigation (Lim et al. 2015), we have shown that the combination of narrow-band Ca photometry and low-resolution spectroscopy can effectively search for globular clusters (GCs) with supernovae (SNe) enrichments. We apply this technique to the metal-poor bulge GC NGC 6273 and find two distinct subpopulations having different light and heavy element abundances. Our result suggests that NGC 6273 was massive enough to retain SNe ejecta, which would place this cluster in the growing group of GCs with Galactic building block characteristics, such as ${\omega}$ Centauri and M22.

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Demographics of galactic bulges in the local Universe through UV and Optical windows

  • Kim, Keunho;Oh, Seulhee;Jeong, Hyunjin;Yi, Sukyoung K.
    • The Bulletin of The Korean Astronomical Society
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    • v.39 no.2
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    • pp.47.2-47.2
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    • 2014
  • Bulges of galaxies are thought to have formed and grown at least in part through galaxy mergers, and thus an accurate derivation of their properties can be an effective course to test/confirm our understanding on their formation and evolution in the standard hierarchical merger paradigm. We have generated a sample of galaxy bulges (n = 15,423) in the nearby (0.005 < z < 0.05) universe from the SDSS DR7 and GALEX GR6plus7 databases and derived their structural and photometric properties by means of SExtractor and GALFIT application. Most notable properties include bulge-to-total luminosity ratio, effective radius, disk scale length, ellipticity, and position angle. The UV properties of the bulges have also been analyzed to infer their recent star formation history. A spectroscopic analysis has been performed using their absorption and emission line strengths measured and released by the OSSY team. We present our preliminary results from our investigation mainly focused on stellar population properties and discuss their implications on the formation of bulges.

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Euclid ASTEROSEISMOLOGY AND KUIPER BELT OBJECTS

  • GOULD, ANDREW;HUBER, DANIEL;STELLO, DENNIS
    • Journal of The Korean Astronomical Society
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    • v.49 no.1
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    • pp.9-18
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    • 2016
  • Euclid, which is primarily a dark-energy/cosmology mission, may have a microlensing component, consisting of perhaps four dedicated one-month campaigns aimed at the Galactic bulge. We show that such a program would yield excellent auxilliary science, including asteroseismology detections for about 100 000 giant stars, and detection of about 1000 Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs), down to 2-2.5 mag below the observed break in the KBO luminosity function at I ∼ 26. For the 400 KBOs below the break, Euclid will measure accurate orbits, with fractional period errors ≲ 2.5%.

Star Formation of Merging Disk Galaxies with AGN Feedback Effects

  • Park, Jongwon;Smith, Rory;Yi, Sukyoung K.
    • The Bulletin of The Korean Astronomical Society
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    • v.42 no.1
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    • pp.28.2-28.2
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    • 2017
  • Using numerical hydrodynamics code RAMSES, we perform idealized galaxy merger simulations and study the star formation of merging disk galaxies. In our simulations, we consider the active galactic nucleus (AGN) feedback effect. In order to investigate the star formation influenced by AGN, we run ~60 simulations with various initial conditions. We confirm that star formation is more efficiently suppressed in merging galaxies than in isolated galaxies. In the mergers, AGN effect is more significant when the masses of two galaxies are similar. Furthermore, we find that bulge fraction does not affect the star formation when the AGN effect is considered. We discuss the implications on semi-analytic galaxy formation models and the limitation of the current AGN prescriptions.

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ABUNDANCES OF PLANETARY NEBULAE IN M 31 AND M 32

  • HYUNG SIEK;ALLER LAWRENCE H.;HAN SOO-RYEON;KIM YOUNG-KWANG;HAN WONYONG;CHOI YOUNGJUN
    • Journal of The Korean Astronomical Society
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    • v.33 no.2
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    • pp.97-110
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    • 2000
  • Planetary nebulae provide a direct way to probe elemental abundances, their distributions and their gradients in populations in nearby galaxies. We investigate bulge planetary nebulae in M 31 and M 32 using the strong emission lines, H$\alpha$, He I, [O III], [N II], [S II] and [Ne III]. From the [O III] 4363/5007 line ratio and the [O II] 3727/3729, we determine the electron temperatures and number densities. With a standard modeling procedure (Hyung, 1994), we fit the line intensities and diagnostic temperatures, and as a result, we derive the chemical abundances of individual planetary nebulae in M 31 and M 32. The derived chemical abundances are compared with those of the well-known Galactic planetary nebulae or the Sun. The chemical abundances of M 32 appear to be less enhanced compared to the Galaxy or M 31.

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Observational Evidence of Merging and Accretion in the Milky Way Galaxy from the Spatial Distribution of Stars in Globular Clusters

  • Chun, Sang-Hyun
    • The Bulletin of The Korean Astronomical Society
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    • v.38 no.2
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    • pp.76-76
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    • 2013
  • The current hierarchical model of galaxy formation predicts that galaxy halos contain merger relics in the form of long stellar streams. In order to find stellar substructures in galaxy, we focused our investigation on the stellar spatial density around globular clusters and on the quantitative properties of the evolved sequences in the color-magnitude diagrams (CMDs). First, we investigated the spatial configuration of stars around five metal-poor globular clusters in halo region (M15, M30, M53, NGC 5053, and NGC 5466) and one metal-poor globular cluster in bulge region (NGC 6626). Our findings indicate that all of these globular clusters show strong evidence of extratidal features in the form of extended tidal tails around the clusters. The orientations of the extratidal features show the signatures of tidal tails tracing the clusters' orbits and the effects of dynamical interactions with the galaxy. These features were also confirmed by the radial surface density profiles and azimuthal number density profiles. Our results suggest that these six globular clusters are potentially associated with the satellite galaxies merged into the Milky Way. Second, we derived the morphological parameters of the red giant branch (RGB) from the near-infrared CMDs of 12 metal-poor globular clusters in the Galactic bulge. The photometric RGB shape indices such as colors at fixed magnitudes, magnitudes at fixed colors, and the RGB slope were measured for each cluster. The magnitudes of the RGB bump and tip were also estimated. The derived RGB parameters were used to examine the overall behavior of the RGB morphology as a function of cluster metallicity. The behavior of the RGB shape parameters was also compared with the previous observational calibration relation and theoretical predictions of the Yonsei-Yale isochrones. Our results of studies for stellar spatial distribution around globular clusters and the morphological properties of RGB stars in globular clusters could add further observational evidence of merging scenario of galaxy formation.

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KMTNET: A NETWORK OF 1.6 M WIDE-FIELD OPTICAL TELESCOPES INSTALLED AT THREE SOUTHERN OBSERVATORIES

  • KIM, SEUNG-LEE;LEE, CHUNG-UK;PARK, BYEONG-GON;KIM, DONG-JIN;CHA, SANG-MOK;LEE, YONGSEOK;HAN, CHEONGHO;CHUN, MOO-YOUNG;YUK, INSOO
    • Journal of The Korean Astronomical Society
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    • v.49 no.1
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    • pp.37-44
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    • 2016
  • The Korea Microlensing Telescope Network (KMTNet) is a wide-field photometric system installed by the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute (KASI). Here, we present the overall technical specifications of the KMTNet observation system, test observation results, data transfer and image processing procedure, and finally, the KMTNet science programs. The system consists of three 1.6 m wide-field optical telescopes equipped with mosaic CCD cameras of 18k by 18k pixels. Each telescope provides a 2.0 by 2.0 square degree field of view. We have finished installing all three telescopes and cameras sequentially at the Cerro-Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) in Chile, the South African Astronomical Observatory (SAAO) in South Africa, and the Siding Spring Observatory (SSO) in Australia. This network of telescopes, which is spread over three different continents at a similar latitude of about -30 degrees, enables 24-hour continuous monitoring of targets observable in the Southern Hemisphere. The test observations showed good image quality that meets the seeing requirement of less than 1.0 arcsec in I-band. All of the observation data are transferred to the KMTNet data center at KASI via the international network communication and are processed with the KMTNet data pipeline. The primary scientific goal of the KMTNet is to discover numerous extrasolar planets toward the Galactic bulge by using the gravitational microlensing technique, especially earth-mass planets in the habitable zone. During the non-bulge season, the system is used for wide-field photometric survey science on supernovae, asteroids, and external galaxies.

Bar effects on the central SF and AGN activities in the SDSS galaxy sample

  • Kim, Minbae;Choi, Yun-Yung;Kim, Sungsoo S.
    • The Bulletin of The Korean Astronomical Society
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    • v.41 no.1
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    • pp.35.3-36
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    • 2016
  • We explore the role of bars in AGN-galaxy co-evolution using a volume-limited face-on late-type galaxy sample with $M_r$ < -19.5 and 0.02 < z < 0.055 selected from SDSS DR7. In this study, we investigate how $SFR_{fib}$ as a proxy of gas contents at galactic center (over 1~1.5 kpc bulge scale) and central stellar velocity dispersion, ${\sigma}$, of host galaxies are connected to the bar presence and AGN activity. We find that galaxies are distributed in three distinct regions over the $SFR_{fib}-{\sigma}$ space and the behaviors of their bar fraction ($f_{Bar}$) are clearly different for each region. Galaxies at the AGN dominant region tend to be gas-deficient as $f_{Bar}$ increases and bars are more frequently found in fully-quenched late-type galaxies at the quiescent region, suggesting that bars speed up of the consumption of gas by SF and lead a sudden decline in the central gas. Overall, the bar effects on the AGN activity are positive over the same space except for quiescent galaxies with ${\sigma}$ > $170km\;s^{-1}$. Most significant bar effect on the AGN activity occurs in the less massive galaxies having sufficient gas, whereas the effect on galaxies at the AGN dominant region with higher the AGN fraction is relatively small. We suggest that the bar affect both central SF and AGN activities, but differently for central gas amount and BH (or bulge) mass of galaxies. We also investigate the AGN-bar connection with only pure AGNs and then confirm that they give marginally the same results.

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Formation and evolution of mini halos around a dwarf galaxy sized halo - Candidate sites for the primordial globular clusters

  • Chun, Kyungwon;Shin, Jihye;Kim, Sungsoo S.
    • The Bulletin of The Korean Astronomical Society
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    • v.40 no.2
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    • pp.34.2-34.2
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    • 2015
  • We aim to investigate the formation of primordial globular clusters (GCs) in the isolated dwarf galaxy (${\sim}10^{10}M_{sun}$) with cosmological zoom-in simulations. For this, we modified cosmological hydrodynamic code, GADGET-3, in a way to include the radiative heating/cooling that enables gas particles cool down to T~10K, reionization (z < 8.9) of the Universe, UV shielding ($n_{shield}$ > $0.014cm^{-3}$), and star formation. Our simulation starts in a cubic box of a side length 1Mpc/h with 17 million particles from z = 49. The mass of each dark matter (DM) and gas particle is $M_{DM}=4.1{\times}10^3M_{sun}$ and $M_{gas}=7.9{\times}10^2M_{sun}$, respectively, thus the GC candidates can be resolved with more than hundreds particles. We found the following results: 1) mini halos with the more interactions before merging into the main halo form the more stars and thus have the higher star mass fraction ($M_{star}/M_{total}$), 2) the mini halos with the high $M_{star}/M_{total}$ can survive longer and thus spiral into closer to the galactic center, 3) the majority of them spiral into bulge, but some of them can survive until the last as baryon-dominated system, like the GC.

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