The Surface Brightness Fluctuations and Globular Cluster Populations of Virgo Elliptical and Lenticular Galaxies

The Virgo Cluster of galaxies is a complex system composed of several subclusters or ““ clouds.II Our understanding of this structure is severely limited by the small number of member galaxies for which high-precision distance measurements are available. In this dissertation, I use Hubble Space Telescope archive images to measure precise distances to 15 elliptical and lenticular galaxies in the Virgo Cluster using surface brightness Nuctuations (SBFs) (J. Tonry & D. P. Schneider, 1988, AJ, 96, 807). Furthermore, I identify the globular clusters associated with these galaxies to a limiting magnitude signiÐcantly fainter than the peak of the globular cluster luminosity function (GCLF). Because the GCLF can also be used as a standard candle (see B. C. Whitmore, 1996, in The Extragalactic Distance Scale : Proceedings of the STScI May Symposium, ed. M. Livio, M. Donahue, & N. Panagia [Cambridge : Cambridge Univ. Press], 251, for a review), these images provide independent distance measurements from the same data. In addition, the color distributions of the globular clusters provide an indication of the globular cluster formation history. This study produced the following results :