A classification scheme for young stellar objects using the wide-field infrared survey explorer AllWISE catalog: revealing low-density star formation in the outer galaxy
- Department of Astronomy, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06511 (United States)
- NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD 20771 (United States)
We present an assessment of the performance of WISE and the AllWISE data release for a section of the Galactic Plane. We lay out an approach to increasing the reliability of point-source photometry extracted from the AllWISE catalog in Galactic Plane regions using parameters provided in the catalog. We use the resulting catalog to construct a new, revised young star detection and classification scheme combining WISE and 2MASS near- and mid-infrared colors and magnitudes and test it in a section of the outer Milky Way. The clustering properties of the candidate Class I and II stars using a nearest neighbor density calculation and the two-point correlation function suggest that the majority of stars do form in massive star-forming regions, and any isolated mode of star formation is at most a small fraction of the total star forming output of the Galaxy. We also show that the isolated component may be very small and could represent the tail end of a single mechanism of star formation in line with models of molecular cloud collapse with supersonic turbulence and not a separate mode all to itself.
- OSTI ID:
- 22365270
- Journal Information:
- Astrophysical Journal, Vol. 791, Issue 2; Other Information: Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 0004-637X
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
Similar Records
The unWISE Catalog: Two Billion Infrared Sources from Five Years of WISE Imaging
Spectroscopic assessment of Wise-based young stellar object selection near λ and σ Orionis