Astron. Astrophys. 317, 694-700 (1997)

8. Conclusions

The limits we have obtained on the dust content of the GCs M 3 and M 22 are comparable to the implied dust mass in 47 Tuc (Gillett et al. 1988), and are somewhat lower than previous limits for other clusters. Although these results refer only to the cluster core, they reinforce previous conclusions that the dust mass in GCs is significantly less than expected if no significant removal mechanisms are occurring. Thus for M 3 we expect 1.2 of dust (Table 6), but find less than 0.00053...0.0031 (Table 7) for the most plausible temperature range and .

The dust must thus have been destroyed, expelled, hiding in a non-centrally concentrated location, or extremely cold ( K).

© European Southern Observatory (ESO) 1997

Online publication: July 8, 1998
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