The <italic>Hubble Space Telescope</italic> UV Legacy Survey of Galactic globular clusters – XIV. Multiple stellar populations within M 15 and their radial distribution★.

In the context of the <italic>Hubble Space Telescope</italic> UV Survey of Galactic globular clusters (GCs), we derived high-precision, multi-band photometry to investigate the multiple stellar populations in the massive and metal-poor GC M 15. By creating for red-giant branch (RGB) stars of the cluster a 'chromosome map', which is a pseudo two-colour diagram made with appropriate combination of <italic>F275W, F336W, F438W</italic>, and <italic>F814W</italic> magnitudes, we revealed colour spreads around two of the three already known stellar populations. These spreads cannot be produced by photometric errors alone and could hide the existence of (two) additional populations. This discovery increases the complexity of the multiple-population phenomenon in M 15. Our analysis shows that M 15 exhibits a faint sub-giant branch (SGB), which is also detected in colour–magnitude diagrams (CMDs) made with optical magnitudes only. This poorly populated SGB includes about 5 per cent of the total number of SGB stars and evolves into a red RGB in the <italic>m</italic>_F336W versus <italic>m</italic>_F336W − <italic>m</italic>_F814W CMD, suggesting that M 15 belongs to the class of Type II GCs. We measured the relative number of stars in each population at various radial distances from the cluster centre, showing that all of these populations share the same radial distribution within statistic uncertainties. These new findings are discussed in the context of the formation and evolution scenarios of the multiple populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]