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Instantaneous starburst of the massive clusters Westerlund 1 and NGC 3603 YC

Authors :
Kudryavtseva, Natalia
Brandner, Wolfgang
Gennaro, Mario
Rochau, Boyke
Stolte, Andrea
Andersen, Morten
Da Rio, Nicola
Henning, Thomas
Tognelli, Emanuele
Hogg, David
Clark, Simon
Water, Rens
Publication Year :
2012

Abstract

We present a new method to determine the age spread of resolved stellar populations in a starburst cluster. The method relies on a two-step process. In the first step, kinematic members of the cluster are identified based on multi-epoch astrometric monitoring. In the second step, a Bayesian analysis is carried out, comparing the observed photometric sequence of cluster members with sets of theoretical isochrones. When applying this methodology to optical and near-infrared high angular resolution Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and adaptive optics observations of the ~5 Myr old starburst cluster Westerlund 1 and ~2 Myr old starburst cluster NGC 3603 YC, we derive upper limits for the age spreads of 0.4 and 0.1 Myr, respectively. The results strongly suggest that star formation in these starburst clusters happened almost instantaneously.

Details

Database :
arXiv
Publication Type :
Report
Accession number :
edsarx.1204.5481
Document Type :
Working Paper
Full Text :
https://doi.org/10.1088/2041-8205/750/2/L44