The ages of M31 star clusters: SED versus CMD

DOI

It is well-known that fitting Color-Magnitude Diagrams (CMDs) to theoretical isochrones is the main method to determine star cluster ages. However, when CMDs are not available, the Spectral Energy Distribution (SED)-fitting technique is the only other approach, although it suffers the age-metallicity-reddening degeneracy. In this work, we gather the ages, metallicities, and masses of dozens of M31 star clusters from the CMD-fitting with Hubble Space Telescope images from the literature for comparison. We check the reliability of the SED-fitting results with different models, i.e., Bruzual & Charlot (2003MNRAS.344.1000B) model (BC03), Galaxy Evolutionary Synthesis Models (GALEV), and Advanced Stellar Population Synthesis (ASPS) for the simple stellar populations (SSPs) with single stars (ss)-SSP/binary-star (bs)-SSPs models. The photometry bands includes the Galaxy Evolution Explorer GALEX FUV/NUV bands, optical/near-infrared UBVRIJHK bands, as well as the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) W1/W2 bands. The comparisons show that the SED-fitting ages agree well with the CMD-fitting ages, either with the fixed metallicity or with the free metallicity for both the BC03 and the GALEV model. However, for the ASPS models, it seems that SED-fitting results are systematically older than the CMD ages, especially for the ages log t<9.0 (year). The fitting also shows that the GALEX FUV/NUV-band are more important than the WISE W1/W2 for constraining the ages, which confirms the previous findings. We also derived the masses of our sample star clusters from the BC03 and GALEV models and it is found that the values agree well with those in the literature.

Cone search capability for table J/AJ/156/191/table1 (Ages of our star clusters derived from SED fits of different passband combinations with BC03 models and Padova 2000 stellar evolutionary tracks)

Identifier
DOI http://doi.org/10.26093/cds/vizier.51560191
Source https://dc.g-vo.org/rr/q/lp/custom/CDS.VizieR/J/AJ/156/191
Related Identifier https://cdsarc.cds.unistra.fr/viz-bin/cat/J/AJ/156/191
Related Identifier http://vizier.cds.unistra.fr/viz-bin/VizieR-2?-source=J/AJ/156/191
Metadata Access http://dc.g-vo.org/rr/q/pmh/pubreg.xml?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_b2find&identifier=ivo://CDS.VizieR/J/AJ/156/191
Provenance
Creator Fan Z.; Li Z.; Zhao G.
Publisher CDS
Publication Year 2019
Rights https://cds.unistra.fr/vizier-org/licences_vizier.html
OpenAccess true
Contact CDS support team <cds-question(at)unistra.fr>
Representation
Resource Type Dataset; AstroObjects
Discipline Astrophysics and Astronomy; Galactic and extragalactic Astronomy; Interdisciplinary Astronomy; Natural Sciences; Observational Astronomy; Physics; Stellar Astronomy