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Thanks! Extragalactically this is very hard on a GC-by-GC basis, but within the Milky Way where we have dynamical and chemical information we have actually already mapped out a lot of our galaxy's merger tree! You may be interested in this astrobite on the topic: astrobites.org/2021/05/04/g...

The big takeaway: galaxy mergers can affect GC systems and in turn studying GC systems can help us study galaxy evolution. Major mergers can noticeably affect the properties of galaxies' GC systems and where they sit on scaling relations.

#extragalactic #astronomy

In addition, that correlation was driven by the *red* GCs specifically, the blue GCs didn't have the same correlation. Since red GCs tend to be formed in massive galaxies and blue GCs in smaller satellites, this result is likely driven by a few major galaxy mergers rather than many minor mergers.

When comparing the steepness of those GC system profiles to where the galaxies sit on the GC system mass - total galaxy mass relation we found that the steepness of those GC system profiles correlated to how offset their host galaxies were on that relation.

For 16 of these galaxies we had colour information and could determine the profiles for the red and blue GCs separately. As expected, the red GCs tend to have steeper profiles and the blue GCs tend to have shallower profiles.

We determined the globular cluster (GC) radial density profiles for 27 brightest cluster galaxies (BCGs) from Hubble photometry. These are massive systems, hosting 1,000s to 10,000s of GCs!

I'm an astronomy PhD student

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