Journal
MONTHLY NOTICES OF THE ROYAL ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY
Volume 419, Issue 1, Pages 14-28Publisher
OXFORD UNIV PRESS
DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-2966.2011.19663.x
Keywords
methods: observational; techniques: photometric; stars: Population II; globular clusters: general
Categories
Funding
- Royal Society
- STFC
- IoA
- STFC [ST/J001538/1] Funding Source: UKRI
- Science and Technology Facilities Council [ST/J001538/1, ST/H00243X/1] Funding Source: researchfish
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Using deep photometric data from Wide Field Camera at the Isaac Newton Telescope and Wide Field Imager at the ESO 2.2-m telescope we measure the outer number density profiles of 19 stellar clusters located in the inner region of the Milky Way halo (within a Galactocentric distance range of 1030 kpc) in order to assess the impact of internal and external dynamical processes on the spatial distribution of stars. Adopting power-law fitting templates, with index -? in the outer region, we find that the clusters in our sample can be divided in two groups: a group of massive clusters (=105 M?) that has relatively flat profiles with 2.5 < ? < 4, and a group of low-mass clusters (=105 M?), with steep profiles (? > 4) and clear signatures of interaction with the Galactic tidal field. We refer to these two groups as tidally unaffected and tidally affected, respectively. Our results also show a clear trend between the slope of the outer parts and the half-mass density of these systems, which suggests that the outer density profiles may retain key information on the dominant processes driving the dynamical evolution of globular clusters.
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