Ennis Ana
Canada – Perimeter Institue / Waterloo Centre for Astrophysics
Extragalactic globular clusters in the era of large surveys
Globular clusters are survivors of the dynamical evolution of a galaxy, and contain within them a chemical record of the early stages of galaxy formation. They are widely used as kinematic tracers of the extended halo, and as tools to detect recent mergers and accretion events in the history of their host galaxy. Recently, it has been suggested they might also be our best tracers for the dark matter distribution of haloes. Understanding their properties is then a key topic in many areas of astronomy, such as stellar evolution, galaxy assembly, and cosmology. In order to fully unlock their potential in this new era of large wide-field photometric surveys, the greatest challenge is to disentangle the age/metallicity degeneracy. In preparation for the upcoming LSST, we present results from a sample of galaxies observed with the UNIONS survey, which observes 4000 square degrees of the northern sky with wide wavelength coverage. We analyze the globular clusters found around each galaxy in the sample, their colours and spatial distribution, and discuss the relation of their properties with those of their host galaxy and its environment.