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D. B. Dahari, E. A. Lada (U. Florida)
Embedded clusters are important laboratories for the study of star and planet formation in our galaxy. We have completed an extensive near-infrared, JHK survey of three star clusters located in the nearby Orion L1630 molecular cloud at a distance of 400 pc. We present an analysis of JHK colors in order to determine and compare the frequency distribution of circumstellar disks in these clusters.
>From our JHK color-color analysis, we find that more than 60 suggesting extremely young ages (~1-2 Myrs) for the clusters. We also investigate the distribution of the near-IR excess sources as a function of radius in each cluster. Finally we construct and compare the K-band luminosity functions (KLFs) for the three clusters. We compare these observed luminosity functions to KLF models (Muench, Lada & Lada 1999) in order to place constraints on the initial mass function (IMF).