G2C2-III: Structural parameters for Galactic globular clusters in SDSS passbands

TL;DR

This study derives structural parameters for 111 Galactic globular clusters using SDSS photometry, compares results with literature, and discusses observational limitations, stellar effects, and correlations with cluster properties.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of globular cluster structural parameters across multiple SDSS passbands, addressing observational biases and stellar effects not extensively covered before.

Findings

Core radii agree with literature

Half-light radii are slightly lower than literature values

Tentative correlation between half-light radii and [Fe/H]

Abstract

We use our Galactic Globular Cluster Catalog (G2C2) photometry for 111 Galactic globular clusters (GC) in g and z, as well as r and i photometry for a subset of 60 GCs and u photometry for 22 GCs, to determine the structural parameters assuming King (1962) models. In general, the resulting core radii are in good comparison with the current literature values. However, our half-light radii are slightly lower than the literature. The concentrations (and therefore also the tidal radii) are poorly constrained mostly because of the limited radial extent of our imaging. Therefore, we extensively discuss the effects of a limited field-of-view on the derived parameters using mosaicked SDSS data, which do not suffer from this restriction. We also illustrate how red giant branch (RGB) stars in cluster cores can stochastically induce artificial peaks in the surface brightness profiles. The issues related to these bright stars are scrutinised based on both our photometry and simulated clusters. We also examine colour gradients and find that the strongest central colour gradients are caused by central RGB stars and thus not representative for the cluster light or colour distribution. We recover the known relation between the half-light radius and the Galactocentric distance in the g-band, but find a lower slope for redder filters. We did not find a correlation between the scatter on this relation and other cluster properties. We find tentative evidence for a correlation between the half-light radii and the [Fe/H], with metal-poor GCs being larger than metal-rich GCs. However, we conclude that this trend is caused by the position of the clusters in the Galaxy, with metal-rich clusters being more centrally located.