Detailed chemical abundances of extragalactic globular clusters

Abstract

We are developing a technique for measuring the detailed chemical composition of unresolved, extragalactic globular clusters (GCs) from echelle spectra of their integrated light. To do this, we are using a "training set" of spatially resolved clusters. We scan these clusters to obtain integrated light spectra, and also take spectra of individual stars in these clusters to obtain "fiducial" abundances by the usual analysis methods. We briefly describe here the importance of obtaining detailed abundances, the technique we are developing to analyze integrated light spectra, and the accuracies that can be obtained with our technique. © 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.