Astronomy & Astrophysics manuscript no. aa˙paper c ESO 2018 October 31, 2018 The Arches cluster out to its tidal radius: dynamical mass segregation and the effect of the extinction law on the stellar mass function. ? M. Habibi1;3 , A. Stolte1 , W. Brandner2 , B. Hußmann1 , K. Motohara4 1 Argelander Institut fur¨ Astronomie, Universitat¨ Bonn, Auf dem Hugel¨ 71, 53121 Bonn, Germany e-mail: [mhabibi;astolte;hussmann]@astro.uni-bonn.de 2 Max-Planck-Institut fur¨ Astronomie, Konigsstuhl¨ 17, 69117 Heidelberg, Germany e-mail:
[email protected] 3 Member of the International Max Planck Research School (IMPRS) for Astronomy and Astrophysics at the Universities of Bonn and Cologne. 4 Institute of Astronomy, The University of Tokyo, Osawa 2-21-1, Mitaka, Tokyo 181-0015, Japan e-mail:
[email protected] Received Oct 14, 2012; accepted May 13, 2013 ABSTRACT The Galactic center is the most active site of star formation in the Milky Way Galaxy, where particularly high-mass stars have formed very recently and are still forming today. However, since we are looking at the Galactic center through the Galactic disk, knowledge of extinction is crucial when studying this region. The Arches cluster is a young, massive starburst cluster near the Galactic center. We observed the Arches cluster out to its tidal radius using Ks-band imaging obtained with NAOS/CONICA at the VLT combined with Subaro/Cisco J-band data to gain a full understanding of the cluster mass distribution. We show that the determination of the mass of the most massive star in the Arches cluster, which had been used in previous studies to establish an upper mass limit for the star formation process in the Milky Way, strongly depends on the assumed slope of the extinction law.