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Session 49 - Young Stellar Objects.
Display session, Tuesday, January 14
Metropolitan Ballroom,
An 8.4 GHz VLA survey of 91 recently discovered T Tauri stars from the ROSAT All-Sky Survey and pointed observations is presented. These objects lie in the vicinity of the Taurus-Auriga star-forming region (d \simeq 140 pc), however some are dispersed nearly 30^\circ from known active star-forming cloud cores. This sample represents a spatially-complete, flux-limited population of X-ray bright T Tauri stars both within and away from the primary Tau-Aur stellar nurseries. Of the 91 sources, 17-29 are detected in this radio survey with a sensitivity limit of \sim0.15 mJy. Hence 19-32% of widely distributed T Tauri stars with L_X \ge 5\times10^28 ergs s^-1 have radio luminosity densities in excess of 3.5\times10^15 erg s^-1Hz^-1. This detection rate and range of radio and X-ray luminosities are consistent with known young weak-lined T Tauri stars (ages \sim 10^6) yr) which reside within the Taurus molecular clouds, but is considerably higher than a ZAMS population such as the Pleiades (age \simeq 7\times10^7 yr). These T Tauri stars fit well among other active young stars on the empirical L_R vs. L_X diagram, implying that solar type gyrosynchrotron activity is the radio emission mechanism.
The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: mamajek@astro.psu.edu