The YSO Population in the Vela-D Molecular Cloud

Abstract

We investigate the young stellar population in the Vela Molecular Ridge, Cloud-D (VMR-D), a star forming (SF) region observed by both Spitzer/NASA and Herschel/ESA space telescope. The point source, band-merged, Spitzer-IRAC catalog complemented with MIPS photometry previously obtained is used to search for candidate young stellar objects (YSO), also including sources detected in less than four IRAC bands. Bona fide YSO are selected by using appropriate color-color and color-magnitude criteria aimed to exclude both Galatic and extragalactic contaminants. The derived star formation rate and efficiency are compared with the same quantities characterizing other SF clouds. Additional photometric data, spanning from the near-IR to the submillimeter, are used to evaluate both bolometric luminosity and temperature for 33 YSOs located in a region of the cloud observed by both Spitzer and Herschel. The luminosity-temperature diagram suggests that some of these sources are representative of Class 0 objects with bolometric temperatures below 70 K and luminosities of the order of the solar luminosity. Far IR observations from the Herschel/Hi-GAL key project for a survey of the Galactic plane are also used to obtain a band-merged photometric catalog of Herschel sources aimed to independently search for protostars. We find 122 Herschel cores located on the molecular cloud, 30 of which are protostellar and 92 starless. The global protostellar luminosity function is obtained by merging the Spitzer and Herschel protostars. Considering that 10 protostars are found in both Spitzer and Herschel list it follows that in the investigated region we find 53 protostars and that the Spitzer selected protostars account for approximately two-thirds of the total.

40 pages, 12 figures, accepted for publication in ApJ

References in corpus (30)

• The Spitzer c2d Legacy Results: Star Formation Rates and Efficiencies; Evolution and Lifetimes
• A Spitzer Survey of Young Stellar Clusters within One Kiloparsec of the Sun: Cluster Core Extraction and Basic Structural Analysis
• Hi-GAL: the Herschel infrared Galactic Plane Survey
• Infrared Extinction Toward Nearby Star-Forming Regions
• The Spitzer c2d Survey of Large, Nearby, Insterstellar Clouds. IX. The Serpens YSO Population As Observed With IRAC and MIPS
• A Herschel and APEX Census of the Reddest Sources in Orion: Searching for the Youngest Protostars
• Evolutionary Signatures in the Formation of Low-Mass Protostars
• Source extraction and photometry for the far-infrared and sub-millimeter continuum in the presence of complex backgrounds
• The Balloon-borne Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope: BLAST
• Probabilistic Cross-Identification of Astronomical Sources
• The Protostellar Luminosity Function
• Herschel observations of B1-bS and B1-bN: two first hydrostatic core candidates in the Perseus star-forming cloud
• The first Hi-GAL observations of the outer Galaxy: a look to star formation in the third Galactic quadrant in the longitude range 216.5 < l < 225.5
• Luminosity Functions of Spitzer Identified Protostars in Nine Nearby Molecular Clouds
• The Luminosities of Protostars in the Spitzer c2d and Gould Belt Legacy Clouds
• Schmidt's Conjecture and Star Formation in Molecular Clouds
• The Structure of Molecular Clouds: II - Column Density and Mass Distributions
• The Spitzer survey of interstellar clouds in the Gould Belt. II. The Cepheus Flare observed with IRAC and MIPS
• The Herschel view of the on-going star formation in the Vela-C molecular cloud
• Interstellar extinction towards open clusters and galactic structure
• The Structure of the Star-forming Cluster RCW 38
• Populations of Young Stellar Objects in Nearby Molecular Clouds
• Fitting density models to observational data - The local Schmidt law in molecular clouds
• The BLAST Survey of the Vela Molecular Cloud: Physical Properties of the Dense Cores in Vela-D
• Star formation in the Vela Molecular Ridge. Large scale mapping of cloud D in the mm continuum
• Mapping molecular emission in Vela Molecular Ridge Cloud D
• Determination of the far-infrared dust opacity in a prestellar core
• A New Approach to Multi-wavelength Associations of Astronomical Sources
• The Spitzer-IRAC Point Source Catalog of the Vela-D Cloud
• Spitzer-IRAC survey of molecular jets in Vela-D

Cited by in corpus (10)

• Hi-GAL, the Herschel infrared Galactic Plane Survey: photometric maps and compact source catalogues. First data release for Inner Milky Way: +68°> l > -70°
• Properties of Hi-GAL clumps in the inner Galaxy]{The Hi-GAL compact source catalogue. I. The physical properties of the clumps in the inner Galaxy ($-71.0^{\circ }<\ell <67.0^{\circ }$)
• Spatial distribution of star formation related to ionized regions throughout the inner Galactic plane
• Remarkable analytic relations among greybody parameters
• The New EXor Outburst of ESO-H-alpha~99 observed by Gaia ATLAS and TESS
• Dense cores and star formation in the giant molecular cloud Vela~C
• Massive Quiescent Cores in Orion: VI. The Internal Structures and a Candidate of Transiting Core in NGC 2024 Filament
• Mid-$J$ CO Line Observations of Protostellar Outflows in the Orion Molecular Clouds
• Assessing the accuracy of the star formation rate measurements by direct star count in molecular clouds
• The Evolutionary Path of Star-Forming Clumps in Hi-GAL