To Be or Not to Be: Very Young Globular Clusters in M31

We present observations made with the newly commissioned Keck laser-guidestar adaptive optics system of 6 objects in M31 that are alleged in multiplerecent studies to be young globular clusters (GCs); all are supposed to haveages less than 5 Gyr. The resulting FWHM of the PSF core in our images is ~70mas. The four youngest of these objects are asterisms; they are with certaintynot young GCs in M31. Based on their morphology, the two oldest are GCs in M31.While the M31 GCs with ages 5 -- 8 Gyr appear to be mostly genuine, it appearsthat many of the alleged very young GCs in M31 are spurious identifications.This problem will be even more severe in studies of the GC systems of moredistant spiral galaxies now underway, for which imaging at the spatialresolution of our observations in M31 may not be adequate to detect samplecontamination by asterisms.