The Age Distribution of Massive Star Clusters in the Antennae Galaxies

By S. M. Fall, R. Chandar, B. Whitmore. 2005

194 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We determine the age distribution of star clusters in the Antennae galaxies (NGC 4038/9) for two mass-limited samples (M > 3 × 104 M☉ and M > 2 × 105 M☉). This is based on integrated broadband UBVI and narrowband Hα photometry from deep images taken with the Hubble Space Telescope. We find that the age distribution of the clusters declines steeply, approximately as dN/dτ ∝ τ-1. The median age of the clusters is ~107 yr, which we interpret as evidence for rapid disruption ("infant mortality"). It is very likely that most of the young clusters are not gravitationally bound and were disrupted near the times they formed by the energy and momentum input from young stars to the interstellar matter of the protoclusters. At least 20% and possibly all stars form in clusters and/or associations, including those that are unbound and short-lived.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/82a3c0cd5d1ad971a4f2f18c8a762fb151510ded

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. Mark R. Krumholz
2. P. Hopkins
3. L. Hernquist
4. D. Merritt
5. S. Larsen
6. L. Ferrarese
7. Luis C. Ho
8. N. Bastian

Citations in the corpus

• The mass function of young star clusters in spiral galaxies (2008, background): “For the Antennae galaxies, mass-independent disruption instead seems to lead to the loss of 80−90% of the cluster population per logarithmic age bin for the first ∼108−109 years (Fall et al. 2005; Whitmore et al. 2007).”
• Star Cluster Demographics. I. A General Framework and Application to the Antennae Galaxies (2006, methodology): “This is demonstrated more clearly in Figure 2 from Fall et al. (2005).”
• THE LONG-TERM EVOLUTION OF THE GALACTIC DISK TRACED BY DISSOLVING STAR CLUSTERS (2010, background): “…masses significantly larger than the typical Milky Way cluster) suggests that the survival fraction is nearly independent of mass until two-body relaxation becomes the dominant destruction process at times 100 Myr after cluster formation (Fall et al. 2005, 2009; Fall 2006; Whitmore et al. 2007).”
• Evidence for the Strong Effect of Gas Removal on the Internal Dynamics of Young Stellar Clusters (2006, background): “Studies of star clusters in the Galaxy (e.g. Lada & Lada 2003) as well as extragalactic clusters (Bastian et al. 2005; Fall et al. 2005) have shown the existence of a large population of young (<10–20 Myr) short-lived clusters.”
• Gas expulsion and the destruction of massive young clusters (2006, unknown): “The destructive expansion of low-eSFE clusters is sufficiently rapid that clusters will likely become completely unobservable within a few tens of Myr, as an increase in radius by a factor of 3 will cause the surface brightness to decline by ∼2.5 mag (see Fall et al. 2005).”
• STELLAR FEEDBACK IN MOLECULAR CLOUDS AND ITS INFLUENCE ON THE MASS FUNCTION OF YOUNG STAR CLUSTERS (2009, background): “This limit is ∼ 107 yr for extragalactic clusters such as those in the Antennae (Fall et al. 2005).”
• CONFIRMATION OF A STAR FORMATION BIAS IN TYPE Ia SUPERNOVA DISTANCES AND ITS EFFECT ON THE MEASUREMENT OF THE HUBBLE CONSTANT (2014, background): “The Antennae tidal tail is indeed quite blue (Hibbard et al. 2005), and contains star clusters with mean ages of 11 The Astrophysical Journal, 802:20 (18pp), 2015 March 20 Rigault et al. 10–100 Myr (Whitmore et al. 1999; Fall et al. 2005).”
• The formation of very wide binaries during the star cluster dissolution phase (2010, background): “…the simulations until the clusters are completely dissolved, which is typically of the order of 20− 50 Myr, the timescale at which the majority of low-mass star clusters are destroyed (see, e.g., Tutukov1978; Boutloukos & Lamers 2003; Bastian et al. 2005; Fall et al. 2005, and numerous others).”
• The big problems in star formation: The star formation rate, stellar clustering, and the initial mass function (2014, background): “…debate in the literature about the exact functional form of this decline, with some authors favoring a power law in age τ of the form dN/dτ ∝ τγ with γ ≈ −1 (Fall et al. 2005, 2009; Chandar et al. 2010a,b, 2011) while others argue for little or no cluster disruption, but that only a small…”
• The ACS Virgo Cluster Survey. XII. The Luminosity Function of Globular Clusters in Early-Type Galaxies (2007, background): “Observations of the young massive clusters in the Antennae galaxies already imply that early disruption isindependent of cluster mass, at least for clusters more massive than several 104M and younger than’ 108 yr (Zhang & Fall 1999; Fall et al. 2005).”