201. Discovery of the Pre-Main Sequence Population of the Stellar Association LH 95 in the Large Magellanic Cloud with Hubble Space Telescope ACS Observations
- Author
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Gouliermis, Dimitrios A., Henning, Thomas, Brandner, Wolfgang, Dolphin, Andrew E., Rosa, Michael, and Brandl, Bernhard
- Subjects
Astrophysics - Abstract
We report the discovery of an extraordinary number of pre-main sequence (PMS) stars in the vicinity of the stellar association LH 95 in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). Using the {\em Advanced Camera for Surveys} on-board the {\em Hubble} Space Telescope in wide-field mode we obtained deep high-resolution imaging of the main body of the association and of a nearby representative LMC background field. These observations allowed us to construct the color-magnitude diagram (CMD) of the association in unprecedented detail, and to decontaminate the CMD for the average LMC stellar population. The most significant result is the direct detection of a substantial population of PMS stars and their clustering properties with respect to the distribution of the higher mass members of the association. Although LH 95 represents a rather modest star forming region, our photometry, with a detection limit $V$ \lsim 28 mag, reveals in its vicinity more than 2,500 PMS stars with masses down to $\sim 0.3$ M{\solar}. Our observations offer, thus, a new perspective of a typical LMC association: The stellar content of LH 95 is found to extend from bright OB stars to faint red PMS stars, suggesting a fully populated Initial Mass Function (IMF) from the massive blue giants down to the sub-solar mass regime., Comment: Accepted for Publication in ApJ Letters - 4 Pages ApJ paper format - 3 figures in low-resolution/grayscale
- Published
- 2007
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