ANALYZING STAR CLUSTER POPULATIONS WITH STOCHASTIC MODELS: THE HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE/WIDE FIELD CAMERA 3 SAMPLE OF CLUSTERS IN M83

The majority of clusters in the universe have masses well below 10(5) M-circle dot. Hence, their integrated fluxes and colors can be affected by the presence or absence of a few bright stars introduced by stochastic sampling of the stellar mass function. Specific methods are being developed to extend the analysis of cluster energy distributions into the low-mass regime. In this paper, we apply such a method to real observations of star clusters, in the nearby spiral galaxy M83. We reassess the ages and masses of a sample of 1242 clusters for which UBVIH alpha fluxes were obtained from observations with the Wide Field Camera 3 instrument on board the Hubble Space Telescope. Synthetic clusters with known properties are used to characterize the limitations of the method (valid range and resolution in age and mass, method artifacts). The ensemble of color predictions of the discrete cluster models are in good agreement with the distribution of observed colors. We emphasize the important role of the Ha data in the assessment of the fraction of young objects, particularly in breaking the age-extinction degeneracy that hampers an analysis based on UBVI data only. We find the mass distribution of the cluster sample to follow a power law of index -2.1 +/- 0.2, and the distribution of ages a power law of index -1.0 +/- 0.2 for log(M/M-circle dot) > 3.5, and ages between 10(7) and 10(9) yr. An extension of our main method, which makes full use of the probability distributions of age and mass obtained for the individual clusters of the sample, is explored. It produces similar power-law slopes and will deserve further investigation. Although the properties derived for individual clusters significantly differ from those obtained with traditional, non-stochastic models in about 30% of the objects, the first-order aspect of the age and mass distributions is similar to those obtained previously for this M83 sample in the range of overlap of the studies. We extend the power-law description to lower masses with better mass and age resolution and without most of the artifacts produced by the classical method.