Description
The (rest-frame) near-IR domain contains important stellar population diagnostics and is often used to estimate masses of galaxies at low, as well as high, redshifts. However, many stellar population models are still relatively poorly calibrated in this part of the spectrum. To allow an improvement of this calibration we present a new database of integrated nearIR JHKs magnitudes for 75 star clusters in the Magellanic Clouds, using the Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS). The majority of the clusters in our sample have robust age and metallicity estimates from color-magnitude diagrams available in the literature, and populate a range of ages from 10Myr to 15Gyr and a range in [Fe/H] from -2.17 to +0.01dex. A comparison with matched star clusters in the 2MASS Extended Source Catalog (XSC) reveals that the XSC only provides a good fit to the unresolved component of the cluster stellar population. We also compare our results with the often-cited single-channel JHK photometry of Persson and coworkers (1983ApJ...266..105P).
|