Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy
Scientific paper
Jan 2012
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2012aas...21915110b&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #219, #151.10
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astronomy
Scientific paper
Traditionally, the light from young stellar clusters has been studied in one of two ways: as an ensemble of individual resolved stars, or as a single integrated value when stars cannot be individually resolved. However, the increasing spatial sensitivity of observations often results in a third possibility where we resolve a handful of a cluster's luminous stars, but the remainder of the cluster's light remains unresolved. Especially in the case of low mass clusters, the contribution from these few bright resolved stars can strongly influence the observed colors of a cluster, thus making it difficult to accurately derive cluster properties such as age, mass, and extinction strictly from the total integrated light. Here, we present a new technique for determining the characteristics of partially resolved clusters by excluding the bright resolved stars, utilizing the stability of the remaining, unresolved light component. We demonstrate the capabilities of this technique by comparison to a variety of simulations. Furthermore, we apply this new technique to a set of partially resolved clusters observed as part of the Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Treasury (PHAT) program, and compare our derived cluster properties with those obtained from traditional methods.
Beerman Lori
Dalcanton Julianne J.
Johnson Clifton L.
PHAT Collaboration
Weisz Daniel R.
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