Globular Cluster Populations: Results Including S4G Late-type Galaxies

Zaritsky, D.; McCabe, Kelsey; Aravena, Manuel; Athanassoula, E.; Bosma, Albert; Comerón, Sébastien; Courtois, Helene M.; Elmegreen, Bruce G.; Elmegreen, Debra M.; Erroz-Ferrer, Santiago; Gadotti, Dimitri A.; Hinz, Joannah L.; Ho, Luis C.; Holwerda, Benne; Kim, Taehyun; Knapen, J. H.; Laine, Jarkko; Laurikainen, Eija; Muñoz-Mateos, Juan Carlos; Salo, Heikki; Sheth, Kartik
Bibliographical reference

The Astrophysical Journal, Volume 818, Issue 1, article id. 99, 11 pp. (2016).

Advertised on:
2
2016
Number of authors
21
IAC number of authors
1
Citations
8
Refereed citations
8
Description
Using 3.6 and 4.5 μm images of 73 late-type, edge-on galaxies from the S4G survey, we compare the richness of the globular cluster populations of these galaxies to those of early-type galaxies that we measured previously. In general, the galaxies presented here fill in the distribution for galaxies with lower stellar mass, M*, specifically {log}({M}*/{M}ȯ )\lt 10, overlap the results for early-type galaxies of similar masses, and, by doing so, strengthen the case for a dependence of the number of globular clusters per 109M⊙ of galaxy stellar mass, TN, on M*. For 8.5\lt {log}({M}*/{M}ȯ )\lt 10.5 we find the relationship can be satisfactorily described as {T}{{N}}={({M}*/{10}6.7)}-0.56 when M* is expressed in solar masses. The functional form of the relationship is only weakly constrained, and extrapolation outside this range is not advised. Our late-type galaxies, in contrast to our early types, do not show the tendency for low-mass galaxies to split into two TN families. Using these results and a galaxy stellar mass function from the literature, we calculate that, in a volume-limited, local universe sample, clusters are most likely to be found around fairly massive galaxies (M* ∼ 1010.8M⊙) and present a fitting function for the volume number density of clusters as a function of parent-galaxy stellar mass. We find no correlation between TN and large-scale environment, but we do find a tendency for galaxies of fixed M* to have larger TN if they have converted a larger proportion of their baryons into stars.