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Description
Circumstellar disks are expected to evolve quickly in massive young clusters harboring many OB-type stars. Two processes have been proposed to drive the disk evolution in such cruel environments: (1) gravitational interaction between circumstellar disks and nearby passing stars (stellar encounters), and (2) photoevaporation by UV photons from massive stars. The relative importance of both mechanisms is not well understood. Studies of massive young star clusters can provide observational constraints on the processes of driving disk evolution. The authors investigate the properties of young stars and their disks in the NGC 6357 complex, concentrating on the most massive star cluster within the complex: Pismis 24. They use infrared data from the 2MASS and Spitzer GLIMPSE surveys, complemented with their own deep Spitzer imaging of the central regions of Pismis 24, in combination with X-ray data to search for young stellar objects (YSOs) in the NGC 6357 complex. The infrared data constrain the disk presence and are complemented by optical photometric and spectroscopic observations, obtained with VLT/VIMOS, that constrain the properties of the central stars. For those stars with reliable spectral types, they combine spectra and photometry to estimate the masses and ages. For cluster members without reliable spectral types, they obtain the mass and age probability distributions from R and I-band photometry, assuming these stars have the same extinction distribution as those in the "spectroscopic" sample. The authors compare the disk properties in the Pismis 24 cluster with those in other clusters/star-forming regions employing infrared color-color diagrams. The authors discover two new young clusters in the NGC 6357 complex. They give a revised distance estimate for Pismis 24 of 1.7 +/- 0.2 kpc. They also find that the massive star Pis 24-18 is a binary system, with the secondary being the main X-ray source of the pair. The authors provide photometry in 9 bands between 0.55 and 8 micron (µm) for the members of the Pismis 24 cluster. They derive the cluster mass function and find that up to the completeness limit at low masses it agrees well with the initial mass function of the Trapezium cluster. They derive a median age of 1 Myr for the Pismis 24 cluster members. The R-band observations were performed on 2008 April 1 and 6, and the I-band observations were done on 2008 May 1, both using the VIMOS instrument on the VLT. The near-IR photometry in the J, H and K<sub>s</sub> bands were taken from the 2MASS. The mid-IR photometry at 3.6, 4.5, 5.8 and 8.0 um were obtained withe the Spitzer IRAC camera, both from the GLIMPSE I survey and from deep observations of the central Pismis 24 region carried out by the authors on 2006 September 29. The X-ray observations were made by the Chandra ACIS-I instrument and previously published by Wang et al. (2007, ApJS, 168, 100: the HEASARC NGC6357CXO table). The X-ray sources were matched to sources detected in the VIMOS R and I bands based on positional coincidence, using a 1.5 arcseconds tolerance. The accuracy of the optical and X-ray positions was 0.6 and 1.0 arcseconds, respectively. Given the high space density of sources in the central regions of Pismis 24, there may be a substantial number (up to 1/6 of the sources) of "false positives", according to the authors. This table contains the list of 643 optical/IR counterparts to the Chandra X-ray sources found by Wang et al. (2007) which were identified by the present authors: for 136 of the 779 X-ray sources, no counterparts were found. This table was created by the HEASARC in March 2012 based on <a href="https://cdsarc.cds.unistra.fr/ftp/cats/J/A+A/539/A119">CDS Catalog J/A+A/539/A119</a> files table1.dat and table3.dat. This is a service provided by NASA HEASARC .
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