Journal
MONTHLY NOTICES OF THE ROYAL ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY
Volume 389, Issue 3, Pages 1470-1478Publisher
OXFORD UNIV PRESS
DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-2966.2008.13705.x
Keywords
methods : data analysis; open clusters and associations : general; galaxies : star clusters; galaxies : stellar content
Categories
Funding
- NASA LTSA [NAG5-13079]
Ask authors/readers for more resources
We present an empirical assessment of the use of broad-band optical colours as age indicators for unresolved extragalactic clusters and investigate stochastic sampling effects on integrated colours. We use the integrated properties of Galactic open clusters (OCs) as models for unresolved extragalactic clusters. The population synthesis code STARBURST99 (SB99) and four optical colours were used to estimate how well we can recover the ages of 62 well-studied Galactic OCs with published ages. We provide a method for estimating the ages of unresolved clusters and for reliably determining the uncertainties in the age estimates. Our results support earlier conclusions based on comparisons to synthetic clusters, namely the (U - B) colour is critical to the estimation of the ages of star-forming regions. We compare the observed optical colours with those obtained from SB99 using the published ages and get good agreement. The scatter in the (B - V)(observed) - (B - V)(model) is larger for lower luminosity clusters, perhaps due to stochastic effects.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available