SCYON Abstract

Received on July 24 2001

M31 Globular Clusters in the HST Archive I. Cluster Detection and Completeness

AuthorsPauline Barmby, John P. Huchra
Affiliation
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
Accepted byAstronomical Journal
Contactpbarmby@cfa.harvard.edu
URLhttp://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/astro-ph/0107401
Links

Abstract

Globular clusters at the distance of M31 have apparent angular sizes of a few arcseconds. While many M31 GCs have been detected and studied from ground-based images, the high spatial resolution of HST allows much more robust detection and characterization of star cluster properties. We present the results of a search of 157 HST/WFPC2 images of M31. We found 82 previously-cataloged globular cluster candidates as well as 32 new globular cluster candidates and 20 open cluster candidates. We present images of the new candidates and photometry for all clusters. We assess existing cluster catalogs' completeness and use the results to estimate the total number of GCs in M31 as 460 ± 70. The specific frequency is SN = 1.2 ± 0.2and the mass specific frequency T = 2.4 ± 0.4; these values are at the upper end of the range seen for spiral galaxies.