IMF from infrared photometry of young stellar clusters in Taurus-Auriga and Orion

TL;DR

This paper presents a new infrared photometry method to derive the initial mass function and extinction properties of young stellar clusters in Taurus-Auriga and Orion, showing good agreement with previous spectroscopic results.

Contribution

The study introduces an extinction-disk-principal vectors approach to estimate the IMF and extinction for young stellar clusters using near-infrared photometry, providing a robust alternative to spectroscopic methods.

Findings

IMF for Taurus-Auriga and Orion clusters are consistent with previous results.

The method effectively estimates individual star extinction and disk contribution.

The Orion cluster shows a high frequency of T Tauri stars with disks.

Abstract

We applied the extinction-disk-principal vectors approach to near infrared photometric data of the Taurus-Auriga region and Orion Nebula young stellar clusters. By assuming that the cluster age is represented by the median value of the age distribution we are able to derive the distribution of stellar masses. We showed that the resulting initial mass function (IMF) for these two young stellar clusters compares remarkably well and might be a robust representation of the IMF obtained by spectroscopic or photometric methods. The method also yields extinction and disk contribution for each star. The overall extinction distribution for the Orion cluster is analyzed and compares well with previous work. The frequency of T Tauri stars with disks is dominant.