Evaporation ages of young star clusters

However, dating methods for very young clusters often disagree, casting doubts on the accuracy of the derived ages. We propose a new method to derive the kinematic age of star clusters based on the evaporation ages of their stars.

The method was validated and calibrated using hundreds of clusters identified in a supernova-driven simulation of the interstellar medium forming stars for approximately 40Myr within a 250pc region. We demonstrate that the clusters' evaporation-age uncertainty can be as small as about 10% for clusters with a large enough number of evaporated stars and small but with realistic observational errors. We have obtained evaporation ages for a pilot sample of ten clusters, finding a good agreement with their published isochronal ages.