A pipeline to detect extragalactic globular clusters in J-PLUS and S-PLUS images

• Grant number: 17/00204-6
• Support type: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Effective date (Start): April 01, 2017
• Effective date (End): December 31, 2018
• Field of knowledge: Physical Sciences and Mathematics - Astronomy - Extragalactic Astrophysics
• Principal researcher: Paula Rodrigues Teixeira Coelho
• Grantee: Danielle de Brito Silva
• Home Institution: Instituto de Astronomia, Geofísica e Ciências Atmosféricas (IAG). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

The Brazilian astronomical community is currently involved in photometric surveys that together will observe more than 15,000 square degrees of the sky. The set of filters from two of these surveys, J-PLUS and S-PLUS, is composed of 5 broadband filters based on SDSS filters, complemented by 7 narrowband filters covering the major stellar indices of 3700 to 9000. These surveys will produce more than 280 TB of new sky images and 12 TB of value-added catalogues extracted from the images. It will be possible to study hundreds of millions of stars in our galaxy, conduct archaeological studies in nearby galaxies, and search for a multitude of astronomical objects with variability patterns, such as variable stars, supernovae, and quasars. One of the areas that can be revolutionized with this new generation of surveys is the study of extragalactic globular clusters. Globular clusters (GCs) are found in most galaxies and can be used to trace the formation of its host galaxy. However, they will not be detected by the data reduction pipeline of the surveys. In this project we propose to fill this gap, and develop a pipeline for the detection of GCs candidates based on the software SExtractor, CHEFs and python scripts. There is great interest from the community in such a tool, which will then be made available for public use. (AU)