The surroundings of the Milky Way globular cluster NGC 6809

Abstract

We study the outer regions of the Milky Way globular cluster NGC6809 based on Dark Energy Camera (DECam) observations, which reach nearly 6 mag below the cluster main sequence (MS) turnoff. In order to unveil its fainter outermost structure, we built stellar density maps using cluster MS stars, once the contamination of field stars was removed from the cluster color-magnitude diagram. We found that only the resulting stellar density map for the lightest stars exhibits some excesses of stars at opposite sides from the cluster centre that diminish soon thereafter at ~ 0.32 deg. Studied globular clusters with apogalactic distances smaller than that of NGC6809 (5.5 kpc) do not have observed tidal tails. The lack of detection of tidal tails in the studied inner globular cluster sample could be due to the reduced diffusion time of tidal tails by the kinematically chaotic nature of the orbits of these globular clusters, thus shortening the time interval during which the tidal tails can be detected. Further investigations with an enlarged cluster sample are needed to confirm whether chaotic and non-chaotic orbits are responsible for the existence of globular clusters with tidal tails and those with extra-tidal features that are different from tidal tails or without any signatures of extended stellar density profiles.

9 pages, 4 figures. Accepted for publication in MNRAS

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Cited by in corpus (4)

• The e-TidalGCs Project: Modeling the extra-tidal features generated by Galactic globular clusters
• On the physical size of the Milky Way globular cluster NGC 7089 (M 2)
• The Nephele ecosystem: stars, globular clusters, and stellar streams associated with the progenitor galaxy of $\omega$ Centauri
• A search for stellar structures around nine outer halo globular clusters in the Milky Way