Light Element Abundances and Multiple Populations in M10

Abstract

We present CN and CH band measurements for 137 RGB and AGB stars in the Galactic globular cluster M10. Our measurements come from low resolution spectroscopy taken with the Hydra spectrograph on the WIYN-3.5m telescope. We use these measurements to identify two populations of stars within the cluster, a CN-normal and CN-enhanced, and find that in our sample 60% of stars are CN-enhanced. Our large sample allows us to conduct a detailed analysis on the carbon and nitrogen abundances and the radial distribution of each population separately. Our analysis of the radial dependence shows that each population has the same radial distribution in the cluster, which is likely due to the cluster being dynamically evolved. We also compare our results to other methods of classifying multiple populations in globular clusters such as the Na-O anti-correlation and the HST pseudo-color magnitude diagrams. We find that these three methods of identifying multiple populations are in good agreement with each other for M10 and all lead to an estimate of the fraction of second generation stars approximately equal to 60%. Among AGB stars, when classified by the CN band, there appears to be a lack of second generation stars when compared to the RGB stars. However, when classified by [N/Fe], we find a similar 60% of AGB stars in the second generation. Finally, we use the measured carbon and nitrogen abundances in RGB stars to study the change of each element with magnitude as stars evolve up the RGB, comparing the results to globular clusters of similar metallicity, M3 and M13.

Publication
arXiv.1805.01529
Date