Published in

American Astronomical Society, Astrophysical Journal, 1(492), p. L41-L44, 1998

DOI: 10.1086/311094

Links

Tools

Export citation

Search in Google Scholar

The Lower Main Sequence of ω Centauri from Deep Hubble Space Telescope NICMOS Near-Infrared Observations

Journal article published in 2009 by Luigi Pulone ORCID, Guido De Marchi, Francesco Paresce, and France Allard
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.

Full text: Download

Red circle
Preprint: archiving forbidden
Red circle
Postprint: archiving forbidden
Green circle
Published version: archiving allowed
Data provided by SHERPA/RoMEO

Abstract

A 20'' × 20'' field located ~7' from the center of the massive galactic globular cluster ω Centauri (NGC 5139) was observed by the NIC2 camera of the Near-Infrared Camera and Multiobject Spectrometer on board the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) through the F110W and F160W broadband filters centered at 1.1 and 1.6 μm for a total of 3000 and 4000 s for the two filters, respectively. Standard photometric analysis of the resulting images yields 340 stars with a signal above a 10 σ threshold in both filters, covering the range of HST m160 magnitudes between 20 and 26, the deepest probe yet of a globular cluster in this wavelength region. These objects form a well-defined sequence in the m160 versus m110-m160 plane that is consistent with the theoretical near-IR color-magnitude diagram expected from recent low-mass stellar model calculations. The resulting stellar luminosity function increases steadily with increasing magnitude up to a peak at m16025, where it turns over and drops slowly down to the detection limit set by the incompleteness limit of 60% at m16026. With the theoretical mass-luminosity relationship that provides the best fit to the IR color-magnitude diagram, we obtain an excellent fit to the observed luminosity function down to a mass of ~0.2 M with a power-law mass function having a slope of α=-1.