Thursday

Multiple Stellar Populations are star populations with star-to-star chemical abundance variations not accounted for by stellar evolutionary processes and exhibiting inverse correlations in abundances between light elements. They are primarily divided into two: primordial population which consists of stars with field-star like abundances and secondary population which consists of stars enriched and depleted in certain elements with respect to the primordial population, that is, inversely correlated with primordial population. Even after decades of research, the origin of multiple stellar populations in star clusters remains enigmatic. The question as to whether the galaxy environment plays a role in their formation or not remains unanswered. To that extent, we analysed two classical (>10 Gyr old) Large Magellanic Cloud globular star clusters namely, NGC 1786 and NGC 1898, using imaging data from Hubble Space Telescope to compare and contrast them with classical Milky Way globular star clusters to assess systematic differences that might exist between their abundance variations. We calculated their Red Giant Branch width in their Colour-Magnitude Diagrams, subtracted the effect of metallicity and compared it with the available data on Milky Way globular clusters by plotting them against total cluster mass. We see that the two clusters follow the same general trend as that of the Milkyway clusters indicating that the galaxy environment may only play a minor role in the formation of multiple stellar populations within star clusters, in contrary to some of the other contemporary studies done on this subject.