Accretion in action: phase space coherence of stellar debris and globular clusters in Andromeda's South-West Cloud

Abstract

A central tenet of the current cosmological paradigm is that galaxies grow over time through the accretion of smaller systems. Here, we present new kinematic measurements near the centre of one of the densest pronounced substructures, the South-West Cloud, in the outer halo of our nearest giant neighbour, the Andromeda galaxy. These observations reveal that the kinematic properties of this region of the South-West Cloud are consistent with those of PA-8, a globular cluster previously shown to be co-spatial with the stellar substructure. In this sense the situation is reminiscent of the handful of globular clusters that sit near the heart of the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy, a system that is currently being accreted into the Milky Way, confirming that accretion deposits not only stars but also globular clusters into the halos of large galaxies.

Accepted for publication in MNRAS Letters; 5 pages, 4 figures

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Cited by in corpus (5)

• Hubble Space Telescope proper motion (HSTPROMO) catalogs of Galactic globular clusters. II. Kinematic profiles and maps
• The Outer Envelopes of Globular Clusters. II. NGC 1851, NGC 5824 and NGC 1261
• Integrated Light Chemical Tagging Analyses of Seven M31 Outer Halo Globular Clusters from the Pan-Andromeda Archaeological Survey
• Global Properties of M31's Stellar Halo from the SPLASH Survey: III. Measuring the Stellar Velocity Dispersion Profile
• The Globular Cluster System of NGC 6822