2006A&A...460..133D

We study the stellar population of the very young cluster NGC 2362, using a deep Chandra ACIS-I X-ray observation. This cluster, only 5Myr old, has already cleared most of its inter- and circumstellar dust, and with its small and uniform reddening offers a unique opportunity of studying its pre-main-sequence stellar population with minimal disturbance from a dense interstellar medium. Our main purposes are to select cluster members down to low masses and to study their properties as a population (spatial properties, initial mass function, and coronal properties). We compare existing deep optical photometry and Hα data with new X-ray data. We use combined optical and X-ray criteria to select cluster members. We detect 387 X-ray sources down to logL_X=29.0(erg/s), and identify most of them (308) with star-like objects. The majority (88%) of optically identified X-ray sources are found to be very good candidate low-mass pre-main-sequence stars, with minimal field-object contamination. This increases the known cluster census by a substantial amount at low masses, with respect to previous optical/IR studies. The fraction of stars with active accretion is found to be in the range 5-9%. We find a significantly wider spatial distribution for low-mass stars than for massive stars (mass segregation). We find only a small spread around the low-mass cluster sequence in the HR diagram, indicating that star formation lasted only about 1-2 Myr. We have derived the cluster initial mass function, which appears to flatten (on the low-mass side) at higher masses with respect to other very young clusters. The quiescent X-ray emission of low-mass cluster stars is found to be rather strictly correlated with the stellar bolometric luminosity: the small spread in this correlation puts an upper bound on the amplitude of X-ray variability on time scales longer than one day (e.g., activity cycles) in such young coronal sources. We find significant X-ray spectral differences between low-mass stars brighter and fainter than logL_X∼30.3(erg/s), respectively, with X-ray brighter stars showing hotter components (kT∼2keV), absent in fainter stars.