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Session 41 - T Tauri Stars & Protostellar Regions.
Display session, Wednesday, June 11
South Main Hall,
The goal of this Senior Distinction Work is to construct and analyze a 3-D, face-on map of the protostars located in the first quadrant of our Galaxy. Distances to these protostars were determined kinematically and then combined with their galactic positions to construct this map. The new distance assignments and estimates of the total fluxes of the protostars were combined to create a Galactic protostellar luminosity function.
A project to catalog all the Galactic protostars contained in the IRAS database is underway at Boston University. The initial step in this process, applying a color selection criteria to the entire IRAS Point Source Catalog, produced a list containing 4,800 protostar candidates.
The heliocentric distances of the protostar candidates located in the first quadrant of the Galaxy were determined kinematically by combining their radial velocities with a galactic rotation curve to establish a galactocentric radius. Radial velocities for protostars in the first quadrant have been compiled from the SIMBAD database of previously published papers and new radio observations of ^12CO at FCRAO. Resolution of the near/far distance ambiguity for each source was performed using the known distribution of molecular gas in the first quadrant. Because protostars form in dense gas, each protostar was assigned the heliocentric distance corresponding to the higher density of gas. The fluxes contained in the IRAS Point Source Catalog were utilized to estimate the bolometric fluxes. Using the distance assignments, an estimate of the luminosity of each protostar has been calculated. Finally, after correcting for the flux-limited bias introduced by the IRAS satellite, a Galactic protostellar luminosity function was created.
In this poster, a face-on map of the distribution of protostars located in the first quadrant of the Galaxy and the corresponding luminosity function are presented.
