The Spatial Distribution of Globular Cluster Systems in Early Type Galaxies: Estimation Procedure and Catalog of Properties for Globular Cluster Systems Observed with Deep Imaging Surveys

Sungsoon Lim; Eric W. Peng; Patrick Côté; Laura Ferrarese; Joel C. Roediger; Chengze Liu; Chelsea Spengler; Elisabeth Sola; Pierre-Alain Duc; Laura V. Sales; John P. Blakeslee; Jean-Charles Cuillandre; Patrick R. Durrell; Eric Emsellem; Stephen D. J. Gwyn; Ariane Lançon; Francine R. Marleau; J. Christopher Mihos; Oliver Müller; Thomas H. Puzia; Rubén Sánchez-Janssen

arXiv · 2411.17049

The Spatial Distribution of Globular Cluster Systems in Early Type Galaxies: Estimation Procedure and Catalog of Properties for Globular Cluster Systems Observed with Deep Imaging Surveys

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Abstract

We present an analysis of the spatial distribution of globular cluster (GC) systems of 118 nearby early-type galaxies in the Next Generation Virgo Cluster Survey (NGVS) and Mass Assembly of early-Type GaLAxies with their fine Structures (MATLAS) survey programs, which both used MegaCam on the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope. We describe the procedure used to select GC candidates and fit the spatial distributions of GCs to a two-dimensional Sérsic function, which provides effective radii (half number radii) and Sérsic indices, and estimate background contamination by adding a constant term to the S'ersic function. In cases where a neighboring galaxy affects the estimation of the GC spatial distribution in the target galaxy, we fit two 2D Sérsic functions, simultaneously. We also investigate the color distributions of GCs in our sample by using Gaussian Mixture Modeling. For GC systems with bimodal color distributions, we divide the GCs into blue and red subgroups and fit their respective spatial distributions with Sérsic functions. Finally, we measure the total number of GCs based on our fitted Sérsic function, and calculate the GC specific frequency.

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Sungsoon Lim, Eric W. Peng, Patrick Côté, Laura Ferrarese, Joel C. Roediger, Chengze Liu, Chelsea Spengler, Elisabeth Sola, Pierre-Alain Duc, Laura V. Sales, John P. Blakeslee, Jean-Charles Cuillandre, Patrick R. Durrell, Eric Emsellem, Stephen D. J. Gwyn, Ariane Lançon, Francine R. Marleau, J. Christopher Mihos, Oliver Müller, Thomas H. Puzia, Rubén Sánchez-Janssen. 2024-11-26. The Spatial Distribution of Globular Cluster Systems in Early Type Galaxies: Estimation Procedure and Catalog of Properties for Globular Cluster Systems Observed with Deep Imaging Surveys. https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.17049

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