Exploration about the origin of galactic and extragalactic star clusters through simulated H-R diagrams

Abstract

The present work explores the origin of the formation of star clusters in our Galaxy and in Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) through simulated H-R diagrams and compare those with observed star clusters. The simulation study produces synthetic H-R diagrams by Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) technique using star formation history (SFH), luminosity function (LF), abundance of heavy metal (Z) and a big library of isochrones as basic inputs and compares them with observed H-R diagrams of various star clusters. The distance based comparison between those two diagrams is carried out through two dimensional matching of points in Color-Magnitude Diagram (CMD) after optimal choice of bin size and appropriate distance function. It is found that a poor medium of heavy elements (Z = 0.0004), Gaia LF along with mixture of multiple Gaussian distributions of SFH may be the origin of formation of globular clusters (GCs). On the contrary, enriched medium (Z = 0.019) is favoured with Gaia LF along with double power law (i.e. unimodal) SFH. For SMC clusters, the choice of exponential LF and exponential SFH is a proper combination for poor medium whereas Gaia LF with Beta type SFH is preferred in an enriched medium for the formation of star clusters.