New Computational Techniques to Determine Ages of LMC Star Clusters from Their Integrated Spectra

ASA'D, RANDA; HANSON, M. M.; AHUMADA, A. V.

Congreso; American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #222; 2013

We are introducing a method of using integrated spectra which will be useful for determining ages in more distant unresolved stellar clusters and galaxies. Using the SOAR and Blanco 4 m telescopes, we obtained the integrated spectra of 20 stellar clusters that did not have integrated spectra in the optical range, or had never been observed before (but have CMDs). Using this sample and 7 other stellar clusters from the literature, we show that for our sample, the statistical Kolmogorov-Smirnov (KS) test can better find the closest match between the observed spectrum and theoretical model than the traditional chi-squared minimization.