HST photometry of M87 globular clusters

The slope of this relation in the I versus V-I color-magnitude diagram ({gamma}_I_=-0.024+/-0.006) is perfectly consistent with expectations based on previously published results using data from the ACS Virgo Cluster Survey.

We show that previously measured half-light radii of M87 GCs from best-fit PSF-convolved King models are consistent with the more accurate measurements in this study, and we also explain how the color-magnitude relation for metal-poor GCs is real and cannot be an artifact of the photometry. We fit Gaussian and evolved Schechter functions to the luminosity distribution of GCs across all colors, as well as divided into blue and red subpopulations, finding that the blue GCs have a brighter mean luminosity and a narrower distribution than the red GCs.