Kinematic differences between multiple populations in Galactic globular clusters

TL;DR

This study investigates the kinematic properties of multiple stellar populations in 25 globular clusters to understand their formation processes, revealing rotation patterns and their relation to cluster relaxation times.

Contribution

It provides the first comprehensive analysis of kinematic differences between multiple populations across a large sample of globular clusters using MUSE spectroscopy.

Findings

Most clusters show rotation, except four.

Some clusters exhibit significant differences in rotation between populations.

Rotation strength correlates with cluster relaxation time.

Abstract

The formation process of multiple populations in globular clusters is still up for debate. Kinematic differences between the populations are particularly interesting in this respect, because they allow us to distinguish between single-epoch formation scenarios and multi-epoch formation scenarios. We analyze the kinematics of 25 globular clusters and aim to find kinematic differences between multiple populations to constrain their formation process. We split red-giant branch (RGB) stars in each cluster into three populations (P1, P2, P3) for the type-II clusters and two populations (P1 and P2) otherwise using Hubble photometry. We derive the rotation and dispersion profiles for each cluster and its populations by using all stars with radial velocity measurements obtained from MUSE spectroscopy. Based on these profiles, we calculate the rotation strength in terms of ordered-over-random motion $\left(v/\sigma\right)_\mathrm{HL}$ evaluated at the half-light radius of the cluster. We detect rotation in all but four clusters. For NGC~104, NGC~1851, NGC~2808, NGC~5286, NGC~5904, NGC~6093, NGC~6388, NGC~6541, NGC~7078 and NGC~7089 we also detect rotation for P1 and/or P2 stars. For NGC~2808, NGC~6093 and NGC~7078 we find differences in $\left(v/\sigma\right)_\mathrm{HL}$ between P1 and P2 that are larger than $1\sigma$. Whereas we find that P2 rotates faster than P1 for NGC~6093 and NGC~7078, the opposite is true for NGC~2808. However, even for these three clusters, the differences are still of low significance. We find that the strength of rotation of a cluster generally scales with its median relaxation time. For P1 and P2, the corresponding relation is very weak at best. We observe no correlation between the difference in rotation strength between P1 and P2 and cluster relaxation time. The MUSE stellar radial velocities that this analysis is based on are made publicly available.