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Session 41 - T Tauri Stars & Protostellar Regions.
Display session, Wednesday, June 11
South Main Hall,
Bok globules are small molecular clouds which are likely sites for star formation. However, finding distances to small Bok globules is difficult. A new method of distance determination has been developed which is based on broad band photometric data acquisition and analysis. Using color-color diagrams to estimate the spectral types and extinctions of M-dwarf stars which occur in front of and behind the molecular clouds, the distances to the clouds can be bracketed to a higher degree of precision than previously possible.
In this poster, this new method is applied to CB24, a small Bok globule from the catalog of Clemens and Barvainis (ApJS 1988). Observations were conducted at the 1-m Mt. Laguna telescope operated by San Diego State University and reduced using IRAF. A (V-I) vs. (B-V) plot of the stars in the 13.7^\prime x 13.7^\prime field has been analyzed, and a select group of thirty-two candidate M-dwarf stars identified. Their colors were de-reddened back to a zero-extinction line whose position was established based on published data for nearby M-dwarfs. A standard extinction law was used to perform the de-reddening and a future effort will explore how changes in the reddening law affect the inferred cloud distance.
