Swinburne Astronomy Online

Project 181: Classifying Young Stellar Objects

This site is to help those of you who have chosen to do the Classifying YSOs project for Swinburne Astronomy Online. The general blurb for this project goes like this: In 1987, Charles Lada introduced a classification scheme for Young Stellar Objects (YSOs) based on the slope of their infrared spectral energy distribution. The resulting scheme of class O, class I, class II and class III YSOs roughly reflects the evolution on young stars from their 'birth' in molecular cloud cores to the pre-main sequence phase. In this project you will use infrared survey data of nearby star-forming regions to classify their YSOs. Research Aims, Procedure and Outcomes: Using photometric data in at least two infrared bands, YSOs can be classified into four classes. In this project you will investigate this infrared YSO classification scheme, and use the literature to classify the YSOs in a nearby star forming region (such as Taurus, Chamaeleon, Corona Australis, etc.). To achieve high marks you will need to compare your results with results from other star forming regions and discuss how the number of each YSO class is related to the evolution of YSOs. There are 4 main aspects to the project: to research, understand and explain the Lada infrared classification scheme of YSOs, and how this classification scheme (roughly) reflects the evolution on young stars from their 'birth' in molecular cloud cores to the pre-main sequence phase; to search the literature for appropriate infrared photometric data of different star forming regions; to classify the YSOs in the chosen dataset and present your statistical results on the number of YSOs in each class; and compare your results with results in the literature for that same star forming region nad also compare and contract with other star forming regions. You should discuss how the number of each YSO class is related to the evolution of YSOs in the star forming regions. A good place to start is with the Lada (1987) paper. You are encouraged to read the whole paper, though the details of the classification scheme are in Section 4. You should also read the Lada & Wilking (1984) and the Adams, Lada & Shu (1987) papers. (Note that there is a lot of maths in the ALS1987 paper, so just take what you can from it!) Also see Andre et al. (1993) for information on Class 0 sources. And for a recent summary, see Lada (2005) (you can download the paper here). Here are some places to start your research: Young stellar objects, Wikipedia Kees Dullemond's lecture notes on Collapse of clouds (Section 4.1) Some good papers in Annual Reviews of Astronomy & Astrophysics: Luhman (2012), The Formation and Early Evolution of Low-Mass Stars and Brown Dwarfs Williams & Cieza (2011), Protoplanetary Disks and Their Evolution (esp. Section 2) Werner et al. (2006), First Fruits of Spitzer: Galactic and Solar System Studies (esp. Section 3) Lada & Lada (2003), Embedded Clusters in Molecular Clouds Databases: Vizier (Vizier tutorial here) NASA/IPAC: Spitzer catalogue (note: MIPS is the Spitzer photometer) NASA/IPAC: 2MASS All Sly Survey NASA/IPAC: IRAS catalogue Don't forget to use me as a resource too. If you're stuck or just need a little guidance, feel free to email me and I'll be happy to help out. Good luck!

Last updated: Thursday, 30-Mar-2017 23:12:47 AEDT
email: smaddison-at-swin.edu.au
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