A Study of Nuclear Star Clusters in Nearby Spiral Galaxies

We present the preliminary photometric and morphological analyses of the central regions that host a nuclear star cluster (NSC) in a sample of nearby disk galaxies with distances < 20 Mpc. In total, we have 53 Milky Way mass disk galaxies observed by the Hubble Space Telescope with a dataset consisting of optical (F814W and F475W bands) and near-IR (F160W band) images from the Wide-Field Camera 3. The analysis fits the images in 2D and takes into account the full complexity of the inner regions of these galaxies to isolate the nuclear star cluster components. We derive the NSC radii and magnitudes in all 3 bands, which we then use to estimate the NSC masses. We compile the mass-radius relationship for the NSCs and examine the trends and scatter in the NSC mass and radius as a function of galaxy mass.