Julia Greissl

We present an analysis of the near-infrared spectrum of a young massive star cluster in the overlap region of the interacting galaxies NGC 4038/39 using population synthesis models. Our goal is to model the cluster population as well as provide rough constraints on its initial mass function (IMF). The cluster shows signs of youth, such as thermal radio emission and strong hydrogen emission lines in the near-infrared. Late-type absorption lines are also present which are indicative of late-type stars in the cluster. The strength and ratio of these absorption lines cannot be reproduced through either late-type pre-main sequence (PMS) stars or red supergiants alone. Thus, we interpret the spectrum as a superposition of two star clusters of different ages, which is feasible since the 1'' spectrum encompasses a physical region of ?90 pc and radii of super-star clusters (SSCs) are generally measured to be a few parsecs. One cluster is young (