Surviving tidal tails around the Milky Way bulge globular cluster NGC 6355

A.E. PIATTI

ASTRONOMICAL JOURNAL

IOP PUBLISHING LTD

Lugar: Londres; Año: 2024

0004-6256

We present results of the analysis of a set of images obtained in the field of the Milky Way bulgeglobular cluster NGC 6355 using the Dark Energy Camera, which is attached to the 4m Blanco telescopeof the Cerro-Tololo Interamerican Observatory. We dealt with a heavy differential absorption acrossthe observed field, a crowded field star population, and the superposition of field stars on to thecluster color-magnitude diagram main features to produce an intrinsic cluster stars density map. Theresulting stellar density map reveals the presence of an extended envelope, a tidal tail, and scattereddebris; the tidal tails pointing toward the Milky Way center. Such extra-tidal overdensities, detectedabove the mean star field density, resulted to be between four and six times larger that the local starfield density fluctuation. They have also been recently generated by two independent studies whichperformed numerical simulations of synthetic tidal tails of Milky Way globular clusters. These resultscontrast with previous theoretical speculations about the possibility to detect tidal tails of globularclusters with chaotic orbits because they would be washed out after they were generated.