An optical/near-infrared survey of GCs in early-type galaxies

Abstract

Optical/near-infrared observations for 14 globular cluster (GC) systems in early- type galaxies are presented. We investigate the recent claims (Yoon, Yi & Lee 2006) of colour bimodality in GC systems being an artefact of the non linear colour - metallicity transformation driven by the horizontal branch morphology. Taking the advantage of the fact that the combination of optical and near-infrared colours can in principle break the age/metallicity degeneracy we also analyse age distributions in these systems.

6 pages, 3 figures, contributed talk to appear in the proceedings of IAU Symp. 266 (Star Clusters - Basic Galactic Building Blocks throughout Time and Space), eds. R. de Grijs and J. Lepine