光学天文与技术应用研究室知识库

The number of methods used to study the properties of galaxies is increasing, and it is very important to test these methods. Galactic globular clusters (GCs) provide an excellent medium for such tests, because they can be considered as simple stellar populations. We present ages and metallicities for 40 Galactic GCs as determined from three publicly available techniques, namely the colour, Lick-index and spectrum-fitting methods, based on Bruzual & Charlot evolutionary population synthesis (EPS) models. By comparisons with the ages obtained from colour-magnitude diagrams (CMDs) and metallicities obtained from the spectra of stars, we are able to estimate the ability of these methods to determine GC parameters, which is essential. We find that: (i) for the metallicity, our derived metallicities agree with those derived from the spectra of stars - the Lick-index method is suitable for studying metallicity for stellar population systems in the range - 1.5 less than or similar to [Fe/H] less than or similar to -0.7 and the spectrum-fitting method is suitable for studying metallicity for stellar population systems in the range -2.3 less than or similar to [Fe/H] less than or similar to -1.5; (ii) for the age, these three methods have difficulties in age determination - our derived ages are smaller (by about 2.0 Gyr, on average) than the results of CMDs for all three methods. We use Vazdekis and Maraston models to analyse whether our results are dependent on EPS models, and find that the tendency of these two models is the same as that of Bruzual & Charlot models. Our results are independent of the EPS models. In addition, our test is based on old GCs and our conclusions may hold for old stellar population systems.