Bibcode
Bekki, K.; Forbes, Duncan A.; Beasley, Michael A.; Couch, W. J.
Bibliographical reference
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Volume 344, Issue 4, pp. 1334-1344.
Advertised on:
10
2003
Citations
58
Refereed citations
50
Description
We investigate, via numerical simulations, the tidal stripping and
accretion of globular clusters (GCs). In particular, we focus on
creating models that simulate the situation for the GC systems of NGC
1404 and 1399 in the Fornax cluster, which have poor (specific frequency
SN~ 2) and rich (SN~ 10) GC systems, respectively.
We initially assign NGC 1404 in our simulation a typical SN
(~5) for cluster ellipticals, and find that its GC system can only be
reduced through stripping to the presently observed value, if its orbit
is highly eccentric (with orbital eccentricity of >0.5) and if the
initial scalelength of the GCs system is about twice as large as the
effective radius of NGC 1404 itself. These stripped GCs can be said to
have formed a `tidal stream' of intracluster globular clusters (ICGCs)
orbiting the centre of the Fornax cluster (many of which would be
assigned to NGC 1399 in an imaging study). The physical properties of
these GCs (e.g. number, radial distribution and kinematics) depend on
the orbit and initial distribution of GCs in NGC 1404. Our simulations
also predict a trend for SN to rise with increasing
clustercentric distance - a trend for which there is some observational
support in the Fornax cluster. We demonstrate that, because the
kinematical properties of ICGCs formed by tidal stripping in the cluster
tidal field depend strongly on the orbits of their previous host
galaxies, observations of ICGC kinematics provides a new method for
probing galaxy dynamics in a cluster.