On the assessment of the nature of open star clusters and the determination of their basic parameters with limited data

Our knowledge of stellar evolution and of the structure and chemical evolution of the Galactic disk largely builds on the study of open star clusters. Because of their crucial role in these relevant topics, large homogeneous catalogues of open cluster parameters are highly desirable. Although effort...

ver descrição completa

Detalhes bibliográficos
Autores: Carraro, Giovanni, Baume, Gustavo Luis, Seleznev, Anton F., Costa, Edgardo
Formato: artículo
Estado:Versión publicada
Fecha de publicación:2017
País:Argentina
Recursos:Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas
Repositorio:CONICET Digital (CONICET)
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:ri.conicet.gov.ar:11336/39892
Acesso em linha:http://hdl.handle.net/11336/39892
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palavra-chave:Open Clusters: General
Open Clusters: Individual (Trumpler 22, Lynga 6, Hogg 19, Hogg 21, Pismis 10, Pismis 14)
https://purl.org/becyt/ford/1.3
https://purl.org/becyt/ford/1
Descrição
Resumo:Our knowledge of stellar evolution and of the structure and chemical evolution of the Galactic disk largely builds on the study of open star clusters. Because of their crucial role in these relevant topics, large homogeneous catalogues of open cluster parameters are highly desirable. Although efforts have been made to develop automatic tools to analyse large numbers of clusters, the results obtained so far vary from study to study, and sometimes are very contradictory when compared to dedicated studies of individual clusters. In this work we highlight the common causes of these discrepancies for some open clusters, and show that at present dedicated studies yield a much better assessment of the nature of star clusters, even in the absence of ideal data-sets. We make use of deep, wide-field, multi-colour photometry to discuss the nature of six strategically selected open star clusters: Trumpler 22, Lynga 6, Hogg 19, Hogg 21, Pismis 10 and Pismis 14. We have precisely derived their basic parameters by means of a combination of star counts and photometric diagrams. Trumpler 22 and Lynga 6 are included in our study because they are widely known, and thus provided a check of our data and methodology. The remaining four clusters are very poorly known, and their available parameters have been obtained using automatic tools only. Our results are in some cases in severe disagreement with those from automatic surveys.