The low-mass pre-MS stellar content of the 30 Dor starburst cluster

Details The low-mass pre-MS stellar content of the 30 Dor starburst cluster The low-mass pre-MS stellar content of the 30 Dor starburst cluster

Dec 1997

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1997hst..prop.7370z&link_type=abstract

HST Proposal ID #7370

Physics

Hst Proposal Id #7370 Young Stars And Circumstellar Material

Scientific paper

We propose to take diffraction limited near-infrared H-band {1.6 um} NICMOS images of the young NGC 2070 cluster {age 3.5 Myr} in the 30Dor giant HII region in the LMC. The aim is to search for the low-mass {M < 2 M_sun} low-luminosity, red pre-Main Sequence stellar population and to establish the H- band infrared luminosity function. With the NICMOS we can now determine whether the IMF in this prototypical extragalactic starburst cluster is deficient in subsolar low-mass stars or not. The best ground-based data can sample only M > 2 M_sun. In principle, NICMOS in the H-band {F160W} is sensitive enough to reach a magnitude of 23.5 in a relatively short integration time, which indeed corresponds to the fantastic possibility to detect young stellar objects with masses near the hydrogen burning limit {M = 0.1M_sun} according to pre-Main Sequence evolutionary models. Even if we could reach only H = 22.5 {i.e. M = 0.4 M_sun}, the observations proposed here would still go a long way in directly answering, by star counts, whether the IMF in starburst galaxies is low-mass deficient or not, with all the corresponding far-reaching implications. The observations would also tell us whether the 30 Dor cluster can be regarded as a prototype young globular cluster. This possibility would be ruled out, if we found NGC 2070 to be low-mass deficient, because old globular clusters do have a rich population of low -mass stars.

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