THE MASS DISTRIBUTION OF STARLESS AND PROTOSTELLAR CORES IN GOULD BELT CLOUDS
- Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Victoria, P.O. Box 355, STN CSC, Victoria BC, V8W 3P6 (Canada)
- Observatoire de Bordeaux, Site de Floirac, 2 rue de l'Observatoire, 33270 Floirac (France)
- Ritter Observatory, MS-113, University of Toledo, 2801 W. Bancroft St., Toledo, OH 43606 (United States)
- Spitzer Science Center, Mail Stop 220-6, California Institute of Technology, 1200 East California Boulevard, Pasadena, CA 91125 (United States)
- University of Massachusetts, Smith College, Northampton, MA 01063 (United States)
- Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, 60 Garden Street, MS-42, Cambridge, MA 02138 (United States)
- Department of Astronomy, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742 (United States)
- Space Telescope Science Institute, 3700 San Martin Dr., Baltimore, MD 21218 (United States)
- Department of Physics and Astronomy PS315, 5151 State University Drive, California State University at Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA 90032 (United States)
Using data from the SCUBA Legacy Catalogue (850 {mu}m) and Spitzer Space Telescope (3.6-70 {mu}m), we explore dense cores in the Ophiuchus, Taurus, Perseus, Serpens, and Orion molecular clouds. We develop a new method to discriminate submillimeter cores found by Submillimeter Common-User Bolometer Array (SCUBA) as starless or protostellar, using point source photometry from Spitzer wide field surveys. First, we identify infrared sources with red colors associated with embedded young stellar objects (YSOs). Second, we compare the positions of these YSO candidates to our submillimeter cores. With these identifications, we construct new, self-consistent starless and protostellar core mass functions (CMFs) for the five clouds. We find best-fit slopes to the high-mass end of the CMFs of -1.26 +- 0.20, -1.22 +- 0.06, -0.95 +- 0.20, and -1.67 +- 0.72 for Ophiuchus, Taurus, Perseus, and Orion, respectively. Broadly, these slopes are each consistent with the -1.35 power-law slope of the Salpeter initial mass function at higher masses, but suggest some differences. We examine a variety of trends between these CMF shapes and their parent cloud properties, potentially finding a correlation between the high-mass slope and core temperature. We also find a trend between core mass and effective size, but we are very limited by sensitivity. We make similar comparisons between core mass and size with visual extinction (for A{sub V} >= 3) and find no obvious trends. We also predict the numbers and mass distributions of cores that future surveys with SCUBA-2 may detect in each of these clouds.
- OSTI ID:
- 21394446
- Journal Information:
- Astrophysical Journal, Vol. 710, Issue 2; Other Information: DOI: 10.1088/0004-637X/710/2/1247; ISSN 0004-637X
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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