Better age estimation using ultraviolet–optical colours: breaking the age–metallicity degeneracy
- Creators
- Kaviraj, S.
- Rey, S.-C.
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Rich, R. M.
- Yoon, S.-J.
- Yi, S. K.
Abstract
We demonstrate that the combination of GALEX ultraviolet (UV) photometry in the far-UV (FUV; ~1530 Å) and near-UV (NUV; ~2310 Å) passbands with optical photometry in the standard U, B, V, R, I filters can efficiently break the age–metallicity degeneracy. We estimate well-constrained ages, metallicities and their associated errors for 42 globular clusters (GCs) in M31, and show that the full set of FUV, NUV, U, B, V, R, I photometry produces age estimates that are ~90 per cent more constrained and metallicity estimates that are ~60 per cent more constrained than those produced by using optical filters alone. The quality of the age constraints is comparable or marginally better than those achieved using a large number of spectroscopic indices.
Additional Information
© 2007 The Authors. Journal compilation © 2007 RAS. Accepted 2007 July 18. Received 2007 July 18; in original form 2006 November 25. We thank Andrés Jordán, Roger Davies, Rachel Somerville and Claudia Maraston for many useful discussions. We are grateful to the referee, Anne Sansom, for an insightful review that greatly improved the quality of the manuscript. SK acknowledges a PPARC DPhil scholarship, a Leverhulme Early-Career Fellowship and Research Fellowships from Worcester College, Oxford and the BIPAC institute at Oxford. SJY and SKY acknowledge support through Grant No. R01-2006-000-10716-0 from the Basic Research Program of the Korea Science & Engineering Foundation.Attached Files
Published - KAVmnras07.pdf
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Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 11340
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:KAVmnras07
- PPARC DPhil Scholarship
- Leverhulme Early-Career Fellowship
- Worcester College
- BIPAC Institute
- Basic Research Program of the Korea Science & Engineering Foundation
- R01-2006-000-10716-0
- Created
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2008-08-08Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2021-11-08Created from EPrint's last_modified field