The Spitzer Gould belt survey of large nearby interstellar clouds: discovery of a dense embedded cluster in the serpens-aquila rift

Gutermuth, R. A. and Bourke, T. L. and Allen, L. E. and Myers, P. C. and Megeath, S. T. and Matthews, B. C. and Jørgensen, J. K. and Di Francesco, J. and Ward-Thompson, D. and Huard, T. L. and Brooke, T. Y. and Dunham, M. M. and Cieza, L. A. and Harvey, P. M. and Chapman, N. L. (2008) The Spitzer Gould belt survey of large nearby interstellar clouds: discovery of a dense embedded cluster in the serpens-aquila rift. Astrophysical Journal Letters, 673 (2). L151-L154. ISSN 0004-637X http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechAUTHORS:20090526-154313730

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Abstract

We report the discovery of a nearby, embedded cluster of young stellar objects, associated filamentary infrared dark cloud, and 4.5 μm 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 comoving with the Serpens Main embedded cluster 3° 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.

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Article

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© 2008 The American Astronomical Society. Received 2007 November 21; accepted 2007 December 14; published 2008 January 8. We thank T. Dame and E. Winston for providing data from Grabelsky et al. (1987) and Winston et al. (2007) in electronic form. This publication makes use of data products from the Two Micron All Sky Survey, which is a joint project of the University of Massachusetts and the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center/California Institute of Technology, funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the National Science Foundation. This research has made use of the SIMBAD database, operated at CDS, Strasbourg, France. This work is based in part on observations made with the Spitzer Space Telescope, which is operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology under a contract with NASA.

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Funding Agency	Grant Number
NASA	UNSPECIFIED
NSF	UNSPECIFIED

Subject Keywords:

ISM: individual (IRAS 18275-0203; IRAS 18274-0205); stars: formation; stars: low-mass, brown dwarfs

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CaltechAUTHORS:20090526-154313730

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http://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechAUTHORS:20090526-154313730

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ID Code:

14307

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CaltechAUTHORS

Deposited By:

Tony Diaz

Deposited On:

27 May 2009 16:33

Last Modified:

26 Dec 2012 11:01

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