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Published May 10, 2021 | Published + Accepted Version
Journal Article Open

Matching Globular Cluster Models to Observations

Abstract

As ancient, gravitationally bound stellar populations, globular clusters represent abundant, vibrant laboratories, characterized by high frequencies of dynamical interactions, coupled to complex stellar evolution. Using surface brightness and velocity dispersion profiles from the literature, we fit 59 Milky Way globular clusters to dynamical models from the CMC Cluster Catalog. Without performing any interpolation, and without any directed effort to fit any particular cluster, 26 globular clusters are well matched by at least one of our models. We discuss in particular the core-collapsed clusters NGC 6293, NGC 6397, NGC 6681, and NGC 6624, and the non-core-collapsed clusters NGC 288, NGC 4372, and NGC 5897. As NGC 6624 lacks well-fitting snapshots on the main CMC Cluster Catalog, we run six additional models in order to refine the fit. We calculate metrics for mass segregation, explore the production of compact object sources such as millisecond pulsars, cataclysmic variables, low-mass X-ray binaries, and stellar-mass black holes, finding reasonable agreement with observations. In addition, closely mimicking observational cuts, we extract the binary fraction from our models, finding good agreement, except in the dense core regions of core-collapsed clusters. Accompanying this paper are a number of python methods for examining the publicly accessible CMC Cluster Catalog, as well as any other models generated using CMC.

Additional Information

© 2021. The American Astronomical Society. Received 2021 January 21; revised 2021 March 5; accepted 2021 March 8; published 2021 May 10. We thank L. Clifton Johnson for invaluable discussions and advice, and the anonymous referee for their useful suggestions. This work was supported by NSF grant AST-1716762, and by the computational resources and staff contributions provided for the Quest high-performance computing facility at Northwestern University. N.Z.R. acknowledges support from the Illinois Space Grant Consortium, and the Dominic Orr Graduate Fellowship. K.K. is supported by an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowship under award No. AST-2001751. N.C.W. acknowledges support from the CIERA Riedel Graduate Fellowship at Northwestern University, as well as the NSF GK-12 Fellowship Program under grant No. DGE-0948017. S.C. acknowledges support from the Department of Atomic Energy, Government of India, under project no. 12-R&D-TFR-5.02-0200. This research has made use of the SVO Filter Profile Service (http://svo2.cab.inta-csic.es/theory/fps/) supported from the Spanish MINECO through grant AYA2017-84089. Software: Astropy (The Astropy Collaboration 2013), IPython (Pérez & Granger 2007), Matplotlib (Hunter 2007), NumPy (Oliphant 2006; Harris et al. 2020), SciPy (Jones et al. 2006; Virtanen et al. 2020), Pandas (McKinney 2010), Cluster Monte Carlo (Pattabiraman & Umbreit 2013), cmctoolkit (Rui et al. 2021), cosmic (Breivik et al. 2020), fewbody (Fregeau et al. 2004).

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Published - Rui_2021_ApJ_912_102.pdf

Accepted Version - 2103.05033.pdf

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Additional details

Created:
August 22, 2023
Modified:
October 23, 2023