The Bulge Globular Cluster System


Martes, 06 Noviembre 2018 8 a.m. — 9 a.m. MST

AURA Lecture Hall

NOIRLab South Colloquia
DOUGLAS GEISLER (Universidad de Concepción & Universidad de La Serena and NOAO South Visiting Astronomer)

Globular clusters (GCs) are the perfect laboratories for studying a wide variety of fundamental problems in stellar and Galactic astrophysics. It has long been recognized that the Galaxy contains at least two GC populations: one associated with the halo and another with the bulge/disk. Both populations are fundamental tracers of their constituent Galactic component. The halo GCs have been studied in great detail and produced an enormous array of scientific advances. However, the bulge component has been relatively neglected, for good reason: most of the bulge GCs suffer from large and often variable reddening, making traditional optical studies extremely difficult, and also lie in very crowded, heavily contaminated fields. Many of them have only very basic parameters measured based on crude optical data. We present new results on a number of bulge GCs based on a variety of near-IR techniques, including detailed abundances obtained from the VLT UVES instrument and deep CMDs from the GEMINI-S GeMS MCAO imager and HST. We also present CAPOS, a long-term project to investigate detailed chemical abundances in bulge GCs using APOGEE-2S.