Chemical Properties of Individual Globular Clusters

Abstract

Rapid improvements in instrumentation over the past few years have made the spectroscopic study of individual globular cluster giants feasable. Three years ago I began a program of high dispersion abundance analyses of such stars to provide a calibration for the many photometric systems used to rank globular clusters in metallicity. The results for four clusters (M92, M15, M13, and M3) of low and intermediate metallicity have already appeared (Cohen, 1978, 1979), and additional detailed analyses of stars in M5 and M13 (Pilachowski, Wallerstein and Leep, 1979) will soon be available. Ignoring the elements C, N, and O, to which we shall return later, these detailed abundance analyses yielded few great surprises; perhaps the metallicity scale that had previously been used was too high by about 0.2 dex, and also it became clear that M3 was a very metal poor cluster. However, the calibration of the metal rich globulars beyond the simple ranking level of Mould, Struthman, and McElroy (1979) had not been attempted.