Bright, Relatively Isolated Star Clusters in PHANGS-HST Galaxies: Aperture Corrections, Quantitative Morphologies, and Comparison with Synthetic Stellar Population Models

TL;DR

This study analyzes bright, isolated star clusters in nearby galaxies using HST imaging to improve aperture corrections, explore morphological measures like $M_{20}$, and compare observed colors with synthetic stellar population models.

Contribution

It introduces a method for aperture correction, applies $M_{20}$ to classify cluster morphologies, and highlights the need to consider metallicity variations in stellar population modeling.

Findings

$M_{20}$ combined with colors distinguishes cluster types.

Color distributions suggest metallicity evolution in clusters.

Aperture corrections improve cluster photometry accuracy.

Abstract

Using PHANGS-HST NUV-U-B-V-I imaging of 17 nearby spiral galaxies, we study samples of star clusters and stellar associations, visually selected to be bright and relatively isolated, for three purposes: to compute aperture corrections for star cluster photometry, to explore the utility of quantitative morphologies in the analysis of clusters and associations, and to compare to synthetic stellar population models. We provide a technical summary of our procedures to determine aperture corrections, a standard step in the production of star cluster candidate catalogs, and compare to prior work. We also use this specialized sample to launch an analysis into the measurement of star cluster light profiles. We focus on one measure, $M_{20}$ (normalized second order moment of the brightest 20% of pixels), applied previously to study the morphologies of galaxies. We find that $M_{20}$ in combination with UB-VI colors, yields a parameter space where distinct loci are formed by single-peaked symmetric clusters, single-peaked asymmetric clusters, and multi-peaked associations. We discuss the potential applications for using $M_{20}$ to gain insight into the formation and evolution of clusters and associations. Finally, we compare the color distributions of this sample with various synthetic stellar population models. One finding is that the standard procedure of using a single-metallicity SSP track to fit the entire population of clusters in a given galaxy should be revisited, as the oldest globular clusters will be more metal-poor compared to clusters formed recently.