Description
A detailed imaging analysis of the globular cluster (GC) system of the Sombrero galaxy (NGC 4594) has been accomplished using a six-image mosaic from the Hubble Space Telescope Advanced Camera for Surveys. The quality of the data is such that contamination by foreground stars and background galaxies is negligible for all but the faintest 5% of the GC luminosity function. This enables the study of an effectively pure sample of 659 GCs until ~2mag fainter than the turnover magnitude, which occurs at M^TOM^_V_=-7.60+/-0.06 for an assumed m-M=29.77. Two GC metallicity subpopulations are easily distinguishable, with the metal-poor subpopulation exhibiting a smaller intrinsic dispersion in color compared to the metal-rich subpopulation.
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