Near infrared imaging of NGC2316

Abstract

In the present paper we present JHK photometric results of the young embedded cluster NGC 2316. We construct the cluster radial profile from which we determine a radius of 0.63 pc. We find 189 $\pm$ 29 cluster members in an extinction limited sub-sample of the survey, 22 $\pm$ 19 of which are possibly substellar. An average extinction of 4.5 visual magnitudes is derived using (H-K) colours of control fields. This extinction is due to the presence of residual parental molecular cloud. NGC 2316 presents 16% source fraction of excess emission which is consistent with other results from clusters with an age of 2-3 Myr. This age is consistent with the distribution of sources in the colour-magnitude diagram when compared to theoretical isochrones, and the overall shape of the cluster KLF. The substellar population of the cluster is similar or smaller than that observed for other embedded clusters and the stellar objects dominate the cluster membership.