Finding Extra Tidal Stars and Percentage of Tidal Strip of Palomar 8
By: Vandana Ganesan Kaushik
Department: Physics & Astronomy
Faculty Advisor: Dr. Charli Sakari
Globular clusters (GC) are massive stellar structures that have witnessed the entire history of our galaxy, and, therefore, enable us to understand the formation and evolution history of both stars and galaxies. The inner few kiloparsecs of the Milky Way, the less studied region that we refer to by convention as the bulge, concentrates an important fraction of the Galaxy’s total stellar mass, holding important clues to its early formation. The questions of how much of the Milky Way galaxy has come from the GCs and how the galactic bulge has formed are still ongoing topics of discussion. This research focuses on understanding the cluster parameters of Palomar 8 (Pal 8) and finding the extra tidal stars and the percentage of tidal stripping of Pal 8, using archival data from 2MASS, Gaia, and Stetson's database using the analysis code ASteCA, and GALA.