Membership probability via control-field colour–magnitude decontamination

Abstract

The fundamental physical parameters of open clusters are important tools to understand the formation and evolution of the Galactic disk and to test star-formation and evolution models. However, only a small fraction of the known open clusters in the Milky Way have precise determinations of distance, reddening, age, metallicity, radial velocity and proper motion. One of the major problems in determining these parameters lies in the difficulty to separate cluster members from field stars and to assign membership. We propose a decontamination method by employing 2mass data in the regions around the clusters NGC 1981, NGC 2516, NGC 6494 and M11. We present decontaminated colour–magnitude diagrams of these objects showing the membership probabilities and structural parameters as derived from King-profile fitting.