The centers of two very dense Globular Clusters

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Session 24 -- Star Clusters/General Relativity
Oral presentation, Wednesday, January 12, 10:15-11:45, Salon V Room (Crystal Gateway)

[24.02] The centers of two very dense Globular Clusters

Brian Yanny (Inst for Adv Study), Puragra Guhathakurta (Princeton University), Donald P Schneider (Inst for Adv Study), John Bahcall (Inst for Adv Study)

We present Hubble Space Telescope Planetary Camera imaging observations of the centers of very dense globular clusters. We discuss the radial profile of stars in the central 2 arcsec of these clusters and compare with predictions of theories of post core collapse cluster profiles. We discuss the appearance of various negative power law stellar density slopes in the center of a cluster under typical observing conditions and compare with the HST observations. We find we cannot rule out a cusp of slope -0.8 in projected stellar density as a function of radius in the center of the cluster M15 (NGC 7078).

Wednesday program listing