SCYON Abstract

Received on May 15 2003

Mass Segregation in Young LMC Clusters

Authors	Richard de Grijs¹, Gerry F. Gilmore¹, Rachel A. Johnson²
Affiliation	¹ Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge, Madingley Road, Cambridge CB30HA, UK ² European Southern Observatory, Casilla 19001, Santiago 19, Chile
To appear in	"The Local Group as an Astrophysical Laboratory", STScI Symp., May 2003, Baltimore (USA), ed. Livio M.
Contact	grijs@ast.cam.ac.uk
URL	http://www.arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0305262
Links

Abstract

We present the detailed analysis of Hubble Space Telescope observations of the spatial distributions of different stellar species in two young compact star clusters in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), NGC 1805 and NGC 1818. Based on a comparison of the characteristic relaxation times in their cores and at their half-mass radii with the observed degree of mass segregation, it is most likely that significant primordial mass segregation was present in both clusters, particularly in NGC 1805. Both clusters were likely formed with very similar initial mass functions (IMFs). In fact, we provide strong support for the universality of the IMF in LMC clusters for stellar masses m_* > 0.8 M_o.