Early-Type Galaxies And Their Sometimes Not So Old Globular Clusters

The work presented here deals with the age structure in globular
cluster systems of early-type galaxies and aims at further clues
about the formation and evolution of these galaxies. Hereby we turn
our attention mainly to the detection of age sub-populations within
the globular cluster systems, which are a clear signature of
multiple star formation events and describe the major phases in the
evolutionary history of the host galaxy. The basic ingredients to
our semi-numerical approach are combined optical and near-infrared
observations of various globular cluster systems and Single Stellar
Population models. Besides the introduction and the test of our
semi-numerical method of deriving the age structure in globular
cluster systems we are also interested in investigating an extended
galaxy sample, i.e. their globular cluster systems in order to find
systematic dependencies of the age structure. Since Single Stellar
Population models are crucial for our project and various of these
models are available we also to evcaluate the influence of our
choice of SSP model on the final result.