The IMF Below 1 Msun in Young Clusters: 1.9micron Water Band Imaging of IC348

Details The IMF Below 1 Msun in Young Clusters: 1.9micron Water Band Imaging of IC348 The IMF Below 1 Msun in Young Clusters: 1.9micron Water Band Imaging of IC348

Dec 1997

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1997hst..prop.7322n&link_type=abstract

HST Proposal ID #7322

Computer Science

Hst Proposal Id #7322 Young Stars And Circumstellar Material

Scientific paper

Using a new and innovative technique, we will take advantage of the unique ability of HST to observe above the Earth's atmosphere in order to characterize in detail the low-mass end of the stellar IMF and the transition to superplanet masses. The water absorption bands that dominate the near-infrared spectra of M stars monotonically increase in strength down to the coolest dwarfs known, making them ideal indicators of effective temperature at low stellar masses. We have constructed from the NICMOS filters, a narrow-band color index that measures the strength of the 1.9micron water feature and allows the efficient and unambiguous determination of both Teff and Av for faint, reddened, low-mass objects. We propose to image the young cluster IC348 in the F166N, F190N, and F215N filters in order to identify the low-mass cluster members and determine the effective temperature and extinction to every cluster member in the range 0.7-0.03M{sun}. IC348 is the ideal cluster for our study. At an age of 5 Myr, the cluster is young enough that it is possible to readily detect and study even objects much below the hydrogen-burning limit. At the same time, the cluster is old enough that infrared continuum excesses {e.g., from circumstellar disks} that would complicate spectral typing are largely absent. This study will be the first to obtain spectral types for a young cluster population complete to K=16, and thereby quantify, to unprecedentedly high precision, the IMF below 1M{sun} in young clusters.

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