A stellar census in globular clusters with MUSE: A spectral catalogue of emission-line sources

TL;DR

This study uses a large spectroscopic survey of 26 globular clusters with MUSE to identify and catalog stars exhibiting emission lines, revealing various exotic stellar objects and potential counterparts to X-ray sources.

Contribution

It introduces a novel blind spectroscopic method to detect emission-line stars in globular clusters using matched filtering on a large data set.

Findings

Identified 156 stars with Hα emission, including known and new cataclysmic variables.

Detected optical counterparts to 39 X-ray sources through Hα emission.

Cataloged diverse exotic stars and background galaxies in globular clusters.

Abstract

Globular clusters produce many exotic stars due to a much higher frequency of dynamical interactions in their dense stellar environments. Some of these objects were observed together with several hundred thousands other stars in our MUSE survey of 26 Galactic globular clusters. Assuming that at least a few exotic stars have exotic spectra, that means spectra that contain emission lines, we can use this large spectroscopic data set of over a million stellar spectra as a blind survey to detect stellar exotica in globular clusters. To detect emission lines in each spectrum, we model the expected shape of an emission line as a Gaussian curve. This template is used for matched filtering on the differences between each observed 1D spectrum and its fitted spectral model. The spectra with the most significant detections of H$\alpha$ emission are checked visually and cross-matched with published catalogues. We find 156 stars with H$\alpha$ emission, including several known cataclysmic variables (CV) and two new CVs, pulsating variable stars, eclipsing binary stars, the optical counterpart of a known black hole, several probable sub-subgiants and red stragglers, and 21 background emission-line galaxies. We find possible optical counterparts to 39 X-ray sources, as we detect H$\alpha$ emission in several spectra of stars that are close to known positions of Chandra X-ray sources. This spectral catalogue can be used to supplement existing or future X-ray or radio observations with spectra of potential optical counterparts to classify the sources.