Pre-main sequence stars in the stellar association N11 in the Large Magellanic Cloud

Abstract

Magellanic Clouds are of extreme importance to the study of the star formation process in low metallicity environments. In this paper we report on the discovery of pre-main sequence candidates and young embedded stellar objects in N11 located in the Large Magellanic Cloud to cast light on the star formation scenario. We would like to remind that this comparison is complicated by the presence of a large age dispersion detected in the fields. Deep archive HST/ACS photometry is used to derive color-magnitude diagrams of the associations in N~11 and of the foreground field population. These data are complemented by archive IR Spitzer data which allow the detection of young embedded stellar objects. The spatial distribution of the pre-main sequence candidates and young embedded stellar objects is compared with literature data observed at different wavelengths, such as H${}_{\alpha }$ and CO maps, and with the distribution of OB and Herbig Ae/Be stars. The degree of clustering is derived using the Minimal Spanning Tree method and the two point correlation function to get insights about the formation process. A large population of pre-main sequence candidates is found in N11. Their masses are in the range of 1.3-2 MSun for ages from 2 to 10 Myr. Young embedded stellar objects having ages of 0.1-1 Myr are found to be intermixed with the candidate pre-main sequence stars. The spatial distribution of the stars shows that this region is the product of clustered star formation. No significant difference is found in the clustering degree of young blue main sequence stars and faint pre-main sequence candidates, suggesting that they might be part of the same formation process. The data suggest that the star formation in the region is a long-lasting process where stars from 0.1 to 10 Myr are widely distributed.

18 pages, 21 figures, accepted for publication in A&A

References in corpus (15)

• Interpreting Spectral Energy Distributions from Young Stellar Objects. I. A grid of 200,000 YSO model SEDs
• Spitzer Survey of the Large Magellanic Cloud, Surveying the Agents of a Galaxy's Evolution (SAGE) I: Overview and Initial Results
• Bump Cepheids in the Magellanic Clouds: Metallicities, the Distances to the LMC and SMC, and the Pulsation-Evolution Mass Discrepancy
• The VLT-FLAMES survey of massive stars: Wind properties and evolution of hot massive stars in the LMC
• The Chemical Enrichment History of the Large Magellanic Cloud
• The Virial Balance of Clumps and Cores in Molecular Clouds
• The Spatial Evolution of Stellar Structures in the LMC
• Evolving structures of star-forming clusters
• Molecular Line Emission from Massive Protostellar Disks: Predictions for ALMA and the EVLA
• Embedded Star Formation in the Eagle Nebula with Spitzer/GLIMPSE
• Age distribution of young clusters and field stars in the SMC
• The Clustering Behavior of Pre-Main Sequence Stars in NGC 346 in the Small Magellanic Cloud
• The low-mass pre-main sequence population of the stellar association LH 52 in the Large Magellanic Cloud discovered with Hubble Space Telescope WFPC2 Observations
• Discovery of the Pre-Main Sequence Population of the Stellar Association LH 95 in the Large Magellanic Cloud with Hubble Space Telescope ACS Observations
• Three clusters of the SMC from ACS/WFC HST archive data: NGC 265, K~29 and NGC 290 and their fields

Cited by in corpus (6)

• Bayesian inference of stellar parameters and interstellar extinction using parallaxes and multiband photometry
• The clustered nature of star formation. Pre--main-sequence clusters in the star-forming region NGC 602/N90 in the Small Magellanic Cloud
• ${\mathcal{Q}}^{+}$: Characterising the structure of young star clusters
• Low-mass pre--main-sequence stars in the Magellanic Clouds
• Pre--Main-Sequence stellar populations across Shapley Constellation III. I. Photometric Analysis and Identification
• Measuring Young Stars in Space and Time -- I. The Photometric Catalog and Extinction Properties of N44