Star Formation in the Extreme Outer Galaxy: the IMF in a low metallicity environment
Abstract
We are conducting a deep near-infrared (NIR) imaging survey of young embedded clusters in the extreme outer Galaxy (hereafter EOG), at the Galactic radius (R_g) of more than 18 kpc. The EOG is an excellent laboratory to study the nature of the IMF in a low-metallicity environment with a great advantage of the proximity compared to nearby dwarf galaxies, such as LMC & SMC. As a first step, we obtained deep NIR images of Digel Cloud 2 clusters at R_g ~19 kpc using the Subaru 8.2-m telescope. The observed K-band luminosity function shows that IMF in the low metallicity environment down to ~ 0.1 M_{sun} is not significantly different from the typical IMFs in the field and in the nearby star clusters as was suggested in our earlier work.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.0801.0204,
title = {Star Formation in the Extreme Outer Galaxy: the IMF in a low metallicity environment},
author = {Chikako Yasui and Naoto Kobayashi and Alan T. Tokunaga and Masao Saito and Chihiro Tokoku},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0801.0204},
year = {2008}
}
Comments
2 pages, 1 figure, To appear in the proceedings of the conference "Formation and Evolution of Galaxy Disks", Rome, Italy, 1-5 October 2007, ASP Conf. Ser., eds. J. G. Funes and E. M. Corsini