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Session 62 - Elliptical Galaxies: Dynamics and the UV Upturn.
Oral session, Tuesday, January 14
Harbour A,
Dynamical evolution of globular clusters in our Galaxy is revisited. All major destruction processes (two-body relaxation, tidal truncation, disk and bulge tidal shocks), including newly discovered tidal shock relaxation, are incorporated into Henon's Fokker-Planck code. The results show much faster evolution of the clusters than found before. From 50% to 80% of the current cluster population may be destroyed in the next Hubble time, depending on the galactic model and the assumptions concerning kinematics of the globular clusters. This large destruction rate implies that many more disperse and less massive clusters may have been already destroyed in the history of the Galaxy. The stars of the Galactic spheroid could be accounted for by the remnants of the destroyed globular clusters. The results for Milky Way are applied to the globular clusters in external galaxies. The globular cluster luminosity function can be corrected for the evolution, thus allowing a revised, physically motivated, distance indicator.
