Physics
Scientific paper
Feb 1999
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1999noao.prop..169s&link_type=abstract
NOAO Proposal ID #1999A-0169
Physics
Scientific paper
have been notably unsuccessful enterprises in the past. However, this changed dramatically in the last two years with the certification of ~20 brown dwarf candidates via detection of lithium in their spectra. Nearly half of those objects are members of the Pleiades open cluster (Stauffer et al. 1998), allowing an accurate determination of the ``lithium depletion boundary" in that cluster and the most accurate, model independent determination of its age. It should now be possible to establish an age scale for young open clusters based solely on measurements of the lithium depletion boundary in those clusters. With the new generation of mosaic CCD imagers, it should also be possible to determine cluster mass functions to well below the hydrogen burning mass limit in these clusters. As a next step in that process, we obtained deep RI imaging of the southern open cluster IC2391 in January 1998 using the CTIO 4m and BTC. According to the traditional age scale, IC2391 is about 30 Myr old; its distance is nearly the same as the Pleiades. We have used the BTC images to identify ~80 candidate faint members of the cluster. We propose to obtain HYDRA spectra of low mass IC2391 candidates to: (a) confirm cluster membership for our candidates; (b) accurately define the lithium depletion boundary (and hence the cluster age) and (c) determine the cluster initial mass function (IMF) to below the hydrogen burning mass limit.
Barrado Navascués David Y.
Patten Brian
Stauffer John R.
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