The velocity dispersion profile of globular clusters : a closer look

Abstract

Measurements of the surface brightness distribution and of the velocity dispersion profile have been so far used to infer the inner dynamics of globular clusters. We show that those observations do not trace back the dark matter potentially concealed in these systems in the form of low-mass compact objects. We have built Michie models of globular clusters which contain both massive and low-mass stars. An analytic expression for the stellar mass densities has been explicitely derived in terms of the usual error function and Dawson's integral. While the heavy population is kept fixed, the abundance of the light species of our models is varied. When stellar velocities are anisotropic, both the surface brightness and the velocity dispersion profiles of the cluster become insensitive to the abundance of low-mass stars. This suggests that the actual stellar mass function of many globular clusters is still to be discovered.