Discovery of new Milky Way star cluster candidates in the 2MASS point
source catalog III. Follow-up observations of cluster candidates in the
Galactic Center region
This paper is part of a project to search the inner Milky Way for hidden
massive clusters and to address the question of whether our Galaxy still forms
clusters similar to the progenitors of the present-day globular clusters.
We report high angular resolution deep near-infrared imaging of 21 cluster
candidates selected from the catalogues of Bica et al. (2003) and Dutra et
al.(2003) in a region around the Galactic Center. These catalogues were created
from visual inspection of the 2MASS images. Seven objects appear to be genuine
clusters, and for these objects we present estimates of extinction, distance
and in some cases age and mass.
Our estimated masses range from 1200 to 5500 solar masses. These clusters are
thus significantly smaller than any Galactic globular cluster, and indicate
that the formation of massive young clusters such as Arches and Quintuplet is
not common in the present-day Milky Way.
The remaining 14 objects are either not clusters or cannot be classified
based on our data.Comment: 8 pages, 19 figures, accepted for publication in A&