THE INFLUENCE OF OBSERVATIONAL ERRORS IN GAIA DR3 ON THE RECONSTRUCTION OF GLOBULAR CLUSTER ORBITS ON A COSMOLOGICAL TIMESCALE

In recent years, the emerging field of astronomy focused on the history of galaxy formation, known as Galactic Archaeology, has been gaining popularity. Globular clusters have been involved in many key processes occurring in the Milky Way, making their study, particularly the reconstruction of their orbits, significantly important. The Gaia DR3 catalog provides parameters for 165 globular clusters, such as proper motions, radial velocity, and heliocentric distance, with certain accuracy. Therefore, it is important to examine the influence of measurement errors in these parameters on the initial data when converting to the Galactocentric coordinate system and, consequently, on the shape of the orbits. We integrated the orbits of globular clusters 10 billion years lookback. For physical justification during the integration, we used the external dynamic potential with the individual number 411321 from the cosmological simulation database IllustrisTNG-100, which best reproduces the potential of the Milky Way. The integration was performed using the parallel N-body code φ-GPU, based on a fourth-order Hermite scheme with hierarchical individual block timesteps. A total of 1,000 randomizations of the initial data were created considering a normal distribution of errors, and the influence of errors on the scatter of initial velocities and on the shape of the orbits was examined. The parameters with the largest relative errors are proper motions and radial velocity, while the smallest errors are in heliocentric distance. It was found that 85% of the globular clusters have relative errors in all parameters of no more than 10%, and 5.4% have errors of no more than 1%. Investigating the influence of measurement errors for clusters with different magnitudes of relative errors, we concluded that for most globular clusters, the influence of measurement errors on the shape of the orbits is not significant. Consequently, it is possible to reconstruct the orbits with high accuracy for these clusters. Since the reconstruction of globular cluster orbits involves cosmological timescales, accounting for measurement errors is an important aspect of the preparatory procedure before the main integration.