Investigating the Stellar Mass Function and Metallicity in Young Open Clusters
Yueyue Shen (NAOC)
Tuesday 11/11/2025 @ 14:00, Sala Antonio Sollima (IV piano Battiferro)
Open clusters serve as ideal laboratories for studying star formation and stellar evolution, particularly the stellar mass function and its potential variations. In this work, we investigate the present-day mass functions of a sample of nearby young open clusters using reliable membership selection with quantified completeness and contamination rates. First, we employ N-body simulations of observation-like clusters to assess selection effects from different clustering algorithms. Cluster properties including age, mass function, and unresolved binary fraction are then derived from color-magnitude diagram fitting. A key focus of this study is the relationship between the mass function and cluster age, which may reflect both the initial conditions of star formation and dynamical evolution effects. However, for a more precise age determination and to explore a possible relation between metallicity and the mass function, we are exploiting spectroscopic surveys to derive metallicity and radial velocity for young open clusters. Preliminary results are presented. These metallicity measurements will ultimately enable us to break the age-metallicity degeneracy and improve our understanding of the interplay between cluster age, chemical composition, and the observed mass function.