A&A 575, A62 (2015) Astronomy DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/201424455 & c ESO 2015 Astrophysics No evidence for significant age spreads in young massive LMC clusters? F. Niederhofer1;2, M. Hilker1, N. Bastian3, and E. Silva-Villa4;5 1 European Southern Observatory, Karl-Schwarzschild-Straße 2, 85748 Garching bei München, Germany e-mail:
[email protected] 2 Universitäts-Sternwarte München, Scheinerstraße 1, 81679 München, Germany 3 Astrophysics Research Institute, Liverpool John Moores University, 146 Brownlow Hill, Liverpool L3 5RF, UK 4 Centre de Recherche en Astrophysique du Québec (CRAQ), Université Laval, 1045 Avenue de la Médecine, G1V 0A6 Québec, Canada 5 FACom-Instituto de Física-FCEN, Universidad de Antioquia, Calle 70 No. 52-21, Medellín, Colombia Received 23 June 2014 / Accepted 20 December 2014 ABSTRACT Recent discoveries have put the picture of stellar clusters being simple stellar populations into question. In particular, the color– magnitude diagrams of intermediate age (1–2 Gyr) massive clusters in the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) show features that could be interpreted as age spreads of 100–500 Myr. If multiple generations of stars are present in these clusters then, as a consequence, young (<1 Gyr) clusters with similar properties should have age spreads of the same order. In this paper we use archival Hubble Space Telescope (HST) data of eight young massive LMC clusters (NGC 1831, NGC 1847, NGC 1850, NGC 2004, NGC 2100, NGC 2136, NGC 2157 and NGC 2249) to test this hypothesis. We analyzed the color–magnitude diagrams of these clusters and fitted their star formation history to derive upper limits of potential age spreads.