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

Abstract

Abstract. Optical/near-infrared observations of 14 globular cluster (GC) systems in early-type galaxies are presented. We investigate the recent claims (Yoon et al. 2006) of colour bimodality in GC systems being an artefact of the nonlinear colour-metallicity transformation driven by horizontal-branch morphology. Taking 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.