The origin of metal-poor and metal-rich globular clusters in E-MOSAICS

Abstract

It has been a long-standing open question why observed globular cluster (GC) populations of different metallicities differ in their ages and spatial distributions, with metal-poor GCs being the older and radially more extended of the two. We use the suite of 25 Milky Way-mass cosmological zoom-in simulations from the E-MOSAICS project, which self-consistently model the formation and evolution of stellar clusters and their host galaxies, to understand the properties of observed GC populations. We find that the different ages and spatial distributions of metal-poor and metal-rich GCs are the result of regular cluster formation at high redshift in the context of hierarchical galaxy assembly. We also find that metallicity on its own is not a good tracer of accretion, and other properties, such as kinematics, need to be considered.

arXiv comment4 pages, 2 figures, to appear in Proceedings IAU Symposium n. 351, "Star Clusters: From the Milky Way to the Early Universe", 2019

References in corpus (16)

• Young massive star clusters
• Extragalactic Globular Clusters and Galaxy Formation
• The age structure of stellar populations in the solar vicinity. Clues of a two-phase formation history of the Milky Way disk
• The formation and assembly history of the Milky Way revealed by its globular cluster population
• Precision measures of the primordial abundance of deuterium
• Formation of globular clusters in hierarchical cosmology
• Globular clusters as the relics of regular star formation in 'normal' high-redshift galaxies
• The E-MOSAICS Project: simulating the formation and co-evolution of galaxies and their star cluster populations
• Reconstructing the star formation history of the Milky Way disc(s) from chemical abundances
• The E-MOSAICS project: tracing galaxy formation and assembly with the age-metallicity distribution of globular clusters
• The origin of diverse $\alpha$-element abundances in galaxy discs
• The relative and absolute ages of old globular clusters in the LCDM framework
• Formation histories of stars, clusters and globular clusters in the E-MOSAICS simulations
• Globular Cluster Formation Within The Aquarius Simulation
• The origin of the 'blue tilt' of globular cluster populations in the E-MOSAICS simulations
• Young star cluster populations in the E-MOSAICS simulations

Cited by in corpus (1)

• Inferring the Age of the Universe with Globular Clusters