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| EPoS Contribution |
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Instantaneous starburst of the massive clusters Westerlund 1 and NGC 3603 YC
Natalia Kudryavtseva MPIA, Heidelberg, Germany | |
| The age spread of a cluster's stellar population is a good indicator of the overall duration of the star formation process in the cluster. From multi-epoch optical and near-infrared high-angular resolution HST and adaptive optics observations of the ~5Myr old starburst cluster Westerlund 1 and ~2 Myr old starburst cluster NGC 3603 YC we derived upper limits for the age spreads of 0.4 and 0.1Myr, respectively. Our results suggest a single event for starburst cluster formation, in contradiction to previous claims that star formation in young massive clusters might have been ongoing for several 10 Myr. Our method based on a two step process. In the first step, kinematic members of the cluster were identified based on multi-epoch astrometric monitoring. In the second step, a Bayesian analysis was carried out, comparing the observed photometric sequence of cluster members with sets of theoretical isochrones. We analyzed the influence of unresolved binarity, photometric error and ongoing accretion on our result. | |
| Collaborators: Wolfgang Brandner, MPIA, Germany Mario Gennaro, MPIA, Germany Boyke Rochau, MPIA, Germany Andrea Stolte, AIfA, Germany Morten Andersen, ESA, The Netherlands Nicola Da Rio, ESA, The Netherlands Thomas Henning, MPIA, Germany Emanuele Tognelli, University of Pisa, Italy David Hogg, CCPP, USA Simon Clark, The Open University, UK Rens Waters, API, The Netherlands |
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