Determining the Age of Young Embedded Clusters

Abstract

A new Monte Carlo method has been developed in order to derive ages of young embedded clusters within massive star forming regions where there is strong differential reddening. After foreground and infrared excess source candidates are removed, each cluster candidate star is individually dereddened. Simulated clusters are constructed using isochrones, an IMF, realistic photometric errors, simulated background field populations and extinction distributions. These synthetic clusters are then dereddened in the same way as the real data, obtained from a deep near infrared survey, and used to derive the ages of 3 embedded clusters. Results were found to be consistent with those determined using spectrophotometric methods. This new method provides way to determine the ages of embedded clusters when only photometric data are available and there is strong differential reddening.

Accepted by MNRAS 27/07/11

References in corpus (8)

• The UKIDSS Galactic Plane Survey
• The WFCAM Science Archive
• Kinematic Distances to Molecular Clouds identified in the Galactic Ring Survey
• A maximum likelihood method for fitting colour-magnitude diagrams
• The Luminosity Functions and Timescales of MYSOs and Compact HII regions
• The RMS Survey: Radio observations of candidate massive YSOs in the southern hemisphere
• The RMS Survey: ${}^{13}$CO observations of candidate massive YSOs in the northern Galactic plane
• Investigating the age and structure of the infrared old open clusters LK1, LK10, FSR1521 and FSR1555

Cited by in corpus (10)

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• New galactic star clusters discovered in the VVV survey. Candidates projected on the inner disk and bulge
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• ANIR : Atacama Near-Infrared Camera for the 1.0-m miniTAO Telescope
• An efficient approach to extract parameters from star cluster CMDs: fitCMD
• Molecular Lines of 13 Galactic Infrared Bubble Regions
• Unveiling hidden properties of young star clusters: differential reddening, star-formation spread and binary fraction
• Infrared identification of hard X-ray sources in the Galaxy
• Constraints on the Surface Magnetic Fields and Age of a Cool Hypergiant: XMM-Newton X-ray Observations of VY CMa
• Do individual Spitzer young stellar object candidates enclose multiple UKIDSS sources?