The Spitzer Gould Belt Survey of Large Nearby Interstellar Clouds: Discovery of a Dense Embedded Cluster in the Serpens-Aquila Rift

Abstract

We report the discovery of a nearby, embedded cluster of young stellar objects, associated filamentary infrared dark cloud, and 4.5 micron shock emission knots from outflows detected in Spitzer/IRAC mid-infrared imaging of the Serpens-Aquila Rift obtained as part of the Spitzer Gould Belt Legacy Survey. We also present radial velocity measurements of the region from molecular line observations obtained with the Submillimeter Array (SMA) that suggest the cluster is co-moving with the Serpens Main embedded cluster 3 degrees to the north. We therefore assign it the same distance, 260 pc. The core of the new cluster, which we call Serpens South, is composed of an unusually large fraction of protostars (77%) at high mean surface density (>430 pc^-2) and short median nearest neighbor spacing (3700 AU). We perform basic cluster structure characterization using nearest neighbor surface density mapping of the YSOs and compare our findings to other known clusters with equivalent analyses available in the literature.

11 pages, 3 figures; Accepted to ApJ Letters; full resolution version at http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/~rgutermuth/preprints/gutermuth_serps.pdf

References in corpus (3)

• The James Clerk Maxwell Telescope Legacy Survey of Nearby Star-forming Regions in the Gould Belt
• A Combined Spitzer and Chandra Survey of Young Stellar Objects in the Serpens Cloud Core
• Outflows from Massive YSOs as Seen with the Infrared Array Camera

Cited by in corpus (48)

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• CARMA Large Area Star Formation Survey: Observational Analysis of Filaments in the Serpens South Molecular Cloud
• Young Stellar Object Variability (YSOVAR): Long Timescale Variations in the Mid-Infrared
• Magnetized filamentary gas flows feeding the young embedded cluster in Serpens South
• The CALYPSO IRAM-PdBI survey of jets from Class 0 protostars. Are jets ubiquitous in young stars ?
• Cluster Formation Triggered by Filament Collisions in Serpens South
• How do stars gain their mass? A JCMT/SCUBA-2 Transient Survey of Protostars in Nearby Star Forming Regions
• Core-Halo Age Gradients and Star Formation in the Orion Nebula and NGC~2024 Young Stellar Clusters
• Identifying star clusters in a field: A comparison of different algorithms
• The Spatial Structure of Young Stellar Clusters. II. Total Young Stellar Populations
• An initial overview of the extent and structure of recent star formation within the Serpens Molecular Cloud using Gaia Data Release 2
• Star-Gas Surface Density Correlations in Twelve Nearby Molecular Clouds I: Data Collection and Star-Sampled Analysis
• Assessing molecular outflows and turbulence in the protostellar cluster Serpens South
• The fragmentation and stability of hierarchical structure in Serpens South
• Distances and statistics of local molecular clouds in the first Galactic quadrant
• Nobeyama 45-m mapping observations toward nearby molecular clouds, Orion A, Aquila Rift, and M17: Project overview
• Diffuse gamma-ray emission toward the massive star-forming region, W40
• The Gould's Belt Very Large Array Survey II: The Serpens region
• Extension of HOPS Out to 500 ParSecs (eHOPS). I. Identification and Modeling of Protostars in the Aquila Molecular Clouds
• The JCMT Gould Belt Survey: Evidence for radiative heating in Serpens MWC 297 and its influence on local star formation
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• Protostellar and Protoplanetary Disk Masses in the Serpens Region
• Testing the star formation scaling relations in the clumps of the North American and Pelican cloud complexes
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• Young Stellar Populations in MYStIX Star Forming Regions: Candidate Protostars
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• The Distribution of UV Radiation Field in the Molecular Clouds of Gould Belt
• Studies of the distinct regions due to CO selective dissociation in the Aquila molecular cloud
• Hierarchical Structure of YSO Clusters in the W40 and Serpens South Region: Group Extraction and Comparison with Fractal Clusters
• Probing the Global Dust Properties and Cluster Formation Potential of the Giant Molecular Cloud G148.24+00.41
• The extended population associated with W40
• A Novel Survey for Young Substellar Objects with the W-band filter III: Searching for very low mass brown dwarfs in Serpens South and Serpens Core
• Protonated hydrogen cyanide as a tracer of pristine molecular gas
• Spatial Statistics in Star Forming Regions: Testing the Limits of Randomness
• HOPS 361-C's Jet Decelerating and Precessing Through NGC 2071 IR
• The Ages of Optically Bright Sub-Clusters in the Serpens Star-Forming Region
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• Inverse Hubble Flows in Molecular Clouds
• The Discovery of Herbig-Haro Objects in LDN 673
• Young Stellar Object Candidates in IC 417
• Survey of (sub)mm water masers in low-mass star-forming regions