Hubble Space Telescope Planetary Camera images of R136

Images obtained with the Planetary Camera on the HST is used here to study the stellar population of R136, the core of the 30 Doradus cluster. It is found that R136a, the brightest knot at the center of R136, is indeed a tight cluster of stars containing at least 12 components in a 1 arcsec region....

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Astronomical journal 1992-11, Vol.104 (5), p.1721-1742
Main Authors: Campbell, Bel, Hunter, Deidre A., Holtzman, Jon A., Lauer, Tod R., Shaya, Edward J., Code, Arthur, Faber, S. M., Groth, Edward J., Light, Robert M., Lynds, Roger
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Astronomy
Astrophysics
Earth, ocean, space
Exact sciences and technology
Globular clusters in external galaxies
Stellar clusters and associations
Stellar systems. Galactic and extragalactic objects and systems. The universe
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Summary:Images obtained with the Planetary Camera on the HST is used here to study the stellar population of R136, the core of the 30 Doradus cluster. It is found that R136a, the brightest knot at the center of R136, is indeed a tight cluster of stars containing at least 12 components in a 1 arcsec region. Three of the stars are of the Wolf-Rayet (W-R) type. The brightest stars have luminosities consistent with their being massive O supergiants or W-R stars. The stellar mass density in R136a is at least a million tiems that of the solar neighborhood. In the larger region known as R136, the magnitudes of 214 stars are detected and measured. A color-magnitude diagram shows a range of stars from luminous O supergiants to ZAMS B3 stars. The diagram is very similar to that of stars outside of R136. A surface brightness profile constructed from stellar photometry is best fit by a pure power law.
ISSN:0004-6256
1538-3881
DOI:10.1086/116355