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Zenodo, 2016

DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.59215

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Toward The Absolute Age Of M92 With Mist

This paper is made freely available by the publisher.
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.

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Abstract

Globular clusters provide a fundamental link between stars and galaxies. For example, it has been suggested that ultra faint dwarf galaxies formed all of their stars prior to the epoch of reionization, but this conclusion hinges entirely on the striking similarity of their stellar populations to the ancient, metal-poor globular cluster M92. The accurate measurement of absolute ages of ancient globular clusters therefore has direct implications for the formation histories of the smallest galaxies in the Universe. However, a reliable determination of the absolute ages of globular clusters has proven to be a challenge due to uncertainties in stellar physics and complications in how the models are compared to observations. I will present preliminary results from a comprehensive study to measure the absolute age of M92 using high-quality HST archival imaging data. We pair our new MESA Isochrones and Stellar Tracks (MIST) models with a full CMD fitting framework to jointly fit multi-color CMDs, taking into account the uncertainties in abundances, distance, and stellar physics. The goal of this project is two-fold. First, we aim to provide the most secure absolute age of M92 to date with robustly estimated uncertainties. Second, we explore and quantify the degeneracies between uncertain physical quantities and model variables, such as the distance, mixing-length-alpha parameter, and helium abundance, with the ultimate goal of better constraining these unknowns with data from ongoing and future surveys such as K2, Gaia, TESS, JWST, and WFIRST.

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