Modeling the Near-Infrared Luminosity Functions of Young Stellar Clusters

Details Modeling the Near-Infrared Luminosity Functions of Young Stellar Clusters Modeling the Near-Infrared Luminosity Functions of Young Stellar Clusters

1999-12-17

arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/9912384v1

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astrophysics

To appear in ApJ (1 April 2000). 37 pages including 11 figures, AAS: ver 5.0

Scientific paper

10.1086/308638

We present the results of numerical experiments designed to evaluate the usefulness of near-infrared luminosity functions for constraining the Initial Mass Function (IMF) of young stellar populations. From this numerical modeling, we find that the luminosity function of a young stellar population is considerably more sensitive to variations in the underlying initial mass function than to either variations in the star forming history or assumed pre-main-sequence (PMS) mass-to-luminosity relation. To illustrate the potential effectiveness of using the KLF of a young cluster to constrain its IMF, we model the observed K band luminosity function of the nearby Trapezium cluster. Our derived mass function for the Trapezium spans two orders of magnitude in stellar mass (5 Msun to 0.02 Msun), has a peak near the hydrogen burning limit, and has an IMF for Brown Dwarfs which steadily decreases with decreasing mass.

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