2007/06/29 by Dimitrios A. Gouliermis, Thomas Henning, W. Brandner +6 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #Astronomy and Astrophysical Research #Astrophysics and Star Formation Studies #Stellar, planetary, and galactic studies #astro-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1086/521224
Accepted for Publication in ApJ Letters - 4 Pages ApJ paper format - 3 figures in low-resolution/grayscale
arxiv created 2007/06/29 · openalex publication_date 2007/07/31 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/31
We report the discovery of an extraordinary number of pre-main-sequence (PMS) stars in the vicinity of the stellar association LH 95 in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC). Using the Advanced Camera for Surveys on board the Hubble Space Telescope in wide-field mode, we obtained deep high-resolution imaging of the main body of the association and of a nearby representative LMC background field. These observations allowed us to construct the color-magnitude diagram (CMD) of the association in unprecedented detail and to decontaminate the CMD for the average LMC stellar population. The most significant result is the direct detection of a substantial population of PMS stars and their clustering properties with respect to the distribution of the higher mass members of the association. Although LH 95 represents a rather modest star-forming region, our photometry, with a detection limit of V ≲ 28 mag, reveals in its vicinity more than 2500 PMS stars with masses down to ~0.3 M ☉ . Thus, our observations offer a new perspective on a typical LMC association: the stellar content of LH 95 is found to extend from bright OB stars to faint red PMS stars, suggesting a fully populated initial mass function from the massive blue giants down to the subsolar mass regime.