The Low-Mass Pre-Main-Sequence Population of the Stellar Association LH 52 in the Large Magellanic Cloud Discovered with Hubble Space Telescope WFPC2 Observations

Abstract

We report on the serendipitous discovery of ~500 low-mass candidate pre-main-sequence (PMS) stars in the vicinity of the stellar association LH 52 in the Large Magellanic Cloud. We present evidence that the red faint sequence of these stars seen in the CMD of LH 52 from Hubble Space Telescope (HST) WFPC2 observations belongs only to the association and follows almost perfectly isochrone models for PMS stars of masses down to ~0.3 M_solar. We find that this feature has a Galactic counterpart and that the mass spectrum of the candidate PMS stars in LH 52 seems to correspond to a Salpeter initial mass function with a slope Γ~=-1.26 in the mass range 0.8-1.4 M_solar.