Nonlinear Color-Metallicity Relations of Globular Clusters. VII. Nonlinear Absorption-line Index versus Metallicity Relations and Bimodal Index Distributions of NGC 5128 Globular Clusters

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

<P>Spectroscopy on the globular cluster (GC) system of NGC 5128 revealed bimodality in absorption-line index distributions of its old GCs. GC division is a widely observed and studied phenomenon whose interpretation has depicted host galaxy formation and evolution such that it harbors two distinct metallicity groups. Such a conventional view of. GC bimodality has mainly been. based on photometry. The recent GC photometric data, however, presented an alternative perspective in which the nonlinear metallicity-to-color transformation is responsible for color bimodality of GC systems. Here we apply the same line of analysis to the spectral indices and examine the absorption-line index versus metallicity relations for the. NGC 5128 GC system. NGC 5128 GCs display nonlinearity in the metallicity-index planes, most prominently for the Balmer lines and by a. non-negligible degree for the metallicity-sensitive magnesium line. We demonstrate that the observed spectroscopic division of NGC 5128 GCs can be caused by the nonlinear nature of the metallicity-to-index conversions and thus one does not need to resort to two separate GC subgroups. Our analysis incorporating this nonlinearity provides a. new perspective on the structure of NGC 5128's GC system, and a further piece to the global picture of the formation of GC systems and their host galaxies.</P>