Detailed photometric analysis of young star groups in the galaxy NGC 300
  The purpose of this work is to understand the global characteristics of the
stellar populations in NGC 300. In particular, we focused our attention on
searching young star groups and study their hierarchical organization.
  The research was conducted using archival point spread function fitting
photometry measured from images in multiple bands obtained with the Advanced
Camera for Surveys of the Hubble Space Telescope. Using the path linkage
criterion, we cataloged young star groups and analyzed them from the
observation of individual stars in the galaxy NGC 300. We also built stellar
density maps from the bluest stars and applied the SExtractor code to identify
overdensities. By plotting isocontours over the density maps and comparing the
two methods, we could infer and delineate the hierarchical structure of the
blue population in the galaxy. For each region of a detected young star group,
we estimated the size and derived the radial surface density profiles for
stellar populations of different color. A statistical decontamination of field
stars was performed for each region. In this way it was possible to build the
color-magnitude diagrams and compare them with theoretical evolutionary models.
We also constrained the present-day mass function per group by estimating a
value for its slope.
  The blue population in NGC 300 shows a hierarchical behavior in which the
larger and loosely distributed structures split into more compact and denser
ones over several density levels. We created a catalog of 1147 young star
groups in six fields of the galaxy NGC 300, in which we present their
fundamental characteristics. The mean and the mode radius values obtained from
the size distribution are both 25 pc, in agreement with the value for the Local
Group and nearby galaxies. Additionally, we found an average PDMF slope that is
compatible with the Salpeter value.
