Mass of Dimmest Stars

The above method to estimate the age of the cluster using massive stars may not work for our obtained data, but it can be used to provide a good estimate for the mass of the dimmest stars in our cluster since our data has been optimized to observe stars with low mass and low luminosities. Using Equation 4 and knowing the distance to our stars (320pc assuming all the stars in our field are located at about the same distance inside our cluster) and the average extinction (measured to be about 1.515 in the K-Band), we calculate that the absolute magnitude of the dimmest star in our cluster is M $_{K_{s}} \approx 6.285$. Using Table 4 in the lab handout, we find that a star of this magnitude in the K-band corresponds to a star that is somewhere between an M0 and M5 main sequence star. We can use this information to get an estimate on the mass of the star by looking up the masses of main sequence stars in another table (Carroll & Ostlie 2006). We find that the mass of the star is about 0.25M$_{\odot}$-0.47M$_{\odot}$.