Bibcode
Scarpa, Riccardo; Marconi, Gianni; Gilmozzi, Roberto
Bibliographical reference
"Proceedings of "Baryons in Dark Matter Halos". Novigrad, Croatia, 5-9 Oct 2004. Editors: R. Dettmar, U. Klein, P. Salucci. Published by SISSA, Proceedings of Science, http://pos.sissa.it, p.55.1"
Advertised on:
12
2004
Citations
4
Refereed citations
3
Description
As part of an ongoing program to test Newton’s law of gravity in
the low acceleration regime using globular clusters, we present here new
results obtained for NGC 6171. Combining VLT spectra for 107 stars with
data from the literature, we were able to trace the velocity dispersion
profile up to 16 pc from the cluster center, probing accelerations of
gravity down to 3.5x10-9 cm s-2 . The velocity dispersion is found to
remain constant at large radii (with an asymptotic values of 2.7 km s-1
) rather than follow the Keplerian falloff. Similar results were
previously found for the globular clusters ω Centauri and M15. We
have now studied three clusters and all three have been found to have a
flat dispersion profile beyond the radius where their internal
acceleration of gravity is a0 1.2x10-8 cm s-2 . Whether this indicates a
failure of Newtonian dynamics or some more conventional dynamical effect
(e.g., tidal heating) is still unclear. However, the similarities
emerging between globular clusters and elliptical galaxies seem to favor
the first of the two possibilities.