Abstract Details
| Name: Manash Samal Affiliation: PRL, Ahmedabad Conference ID: ASI2025_593 Title : Exploring star clusters using with the 2.5m Mt. Abu telescope: the case of NGC 5053 Authors and Co-Authors : Manash Samal and Ranjan Kumar Abstract Type : Poster Abstract Category : Stars, Interstellar Medium, and Astrochemistry in Milky Way Abstract : Star clusters are ideal laboratory for testing stellar evolution of stars in the crowded environment. We explore, a few rich star clusters using the faint object camera (FOC) mounted on the 2.5m telescope of the Mt. Abu observatory. Here, we present a detailed analysis of the one of the observed star clusters, NGC 5053, using g, r, and i filters obtained with the exposure time of 1200 s, 900 s, and 900 s, respectively. The NGC 5053 cluster is an old and extremely metal-poor globular cluster situated in the Galactic halo at a distance of 17.5 kpc. We could achieve the photometric depth of 23.0 mag, 22.7 mag, and 22.6 mag in g, r, and i bands, respectively, with an uncertainty of 0.1 mag each. The g, r, and i filter magnitudes were used to construct the colour-magnitude diagrams (CMDs) to identify stars of various evolutionary phases present in the cluster. We could identify sources in the red-giant branch (RGB), sub-giant branch (SGB), main-sequence turn-off (MSTO) and main sequence (MS) phases. We derived the age of the cluster as 12.5 Gyr by fitting the PARSEC isochrones on the SGB, MSTO, and MS stars in the CMDs. We find the turn-off mass of the cluster as 0.76 Msun. We were able to identify the sources down to 0.6 Msun in the cluster using deep photometry in the g-band. We also observed a few exotic stellar populations in the cluster, e.g., blue straggler and blue lurker stars. Their multi-wavelength photometric fluxes combing (UV, optical, and near-IR) suggest that they are young (age: 3.5 Gyr to 10 Gyr) and massive (0.8 Msun to 1.13 Msun) relative to the cluster age and turn-off mass, respectively; and few of them are in binary system revealing their formation in the cluster through collision/merger as well as through mass-transfer channels. |