Stars, Interstellar Medium and the Galaxy Commons^™

New Constraints On Early-Type Galaxy Assembly From Spectroscopic Metallicities Of Globular Clusters In M87, Alexa Villaume, Aaron Romanowsky, Jean Brodie, Jay Strader

Faculty Publications

The observed characteristics of globular cluster (GC) systems, such as metallicity distributions, are commonly used to place constraints on galaxy formation models. However, obtaining reliable metallicity values is particularly difficult because of our limited means to obtain high quality spectroscopy of extragalactic GCs. Often, "color–metallicity relations" are invoked to convert easier-to-obtain photometric measurements into metallicities, but there is no consensus on what form these relations should take. In this paper we make use of multiple photometric data sets and iron metallicity values derived from applying full-spectrum stellar population synthesis models to deep Keck/LRIS spectra of 177 GCs centrally located around …