English

HST astrometry in the Orion Nebula Cluster: census of low-mass runaways

Solar and Stellar Astrophysics 2020-05-27 v1 Astrophysics of Galaxies

Abstract

We present a catalog of high-precision proper motions in the Orion Nebula Cluster (ONC), based on Treasury Program observations with the Hubble Space Telescope's (HST) ACS/WFC camera. Our catalog contains 2,454 objects in the magnitude range of 14.2<mF775W<24.714.2<m_{\rm F775W}<24.7, thus probing the stellar masses of the ONC from \sim0.4 MM_\odot down to \sim0.02 MM_\odot over an area of \sim550 arcmin2^2. We provide a number of internal velocity dispersion estimates for the ONC that indicate a weak dependence on the stellar location and mass. There is good agreement with the published velocity dispersion estimates, although nearly all of them (including ours at σv,x=0.94\sigma_{v,x}=0.94 and σv,y=1.25\sigma_{v,y}=1.25 mas yr1^{-1}) might be biased by the overlapping young stellar populations of Orion A. We identified 4 new ONC candidate runaways based on HST and the Gaia DR2 data, all with masses less than \sim1 MM_\odot. The total census of known candidate runaway sources is 10 -- one of the largest samples ever found in any Milky Way open star cluster. Surprisingly, none of them has the tangential velocity exceeding 20 km s1^{-1}. If most of them indeed originated in the ONC, it may compel re-examination of dynamical processes in very young star clusters. It appears that the mass function of the ONC is not significantly affected by the lost runaways.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2004.14472,
  title  = {HST astrometry in the Orion Nebula Cluster: census of low-mass runaways},
  author = {Imants Platais and Massimo Robberto and Andrea Bellini and Vera Kozhurina-Platais and Mario Gennaro and Giovanni Strampelli and Lynne A. Hillenbrand and Selma E. de Mink and David R. Soderblom},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2004.14472},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

16 pages, 10 figures, 5 tables. Accepted for publication in AJ