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T. L. Huard, P. C. Myers, A. Crapsi (CfA), D. C. Murphy (Carnegie Inst. of Washington), L. J. Crews (Univ. of TN at Martin), N. J. Evans (Univ. of TX at Austin), C. A. Kulesa, D. W. McCarthy, Jr. (Steward Obs.), Cores-to-Disks Spitzer Legacy Team
The Cores-to-Disks Spitzer Legacy team discovered an extremely faint, red point source projected on L1014, an isolated molecular cloud core previously classified as ``starless'' due to its lack of an IRAS source or outflow (Young et al. 2004). This source, L1014-IRS, was considered likely to be associated with the L1014 core, but no CO outflow could be detected in deep searches (Crapsi et al. 2005), and a chance projection of the core with a distant background source could not be ruled out. Recently, in deep near-infrared H and K observations, we have detected a conical scattering nebula typically associated with young stellar objects. Its apex coincides with L1014-IRS and it extends at least 10\prime\prime north with opening angle ~100\circ. To the south, the observations indicate a highly extincted region. Thus, the nebulosity is consistent with an embedded bipolar nebula with the northern lobe pointing toward the observer, while the southern lobe is pointing away and buried within the densest region of the core. This result confirms that L1014-IRS is embedded in L1014 and is not a chance coincidence of L1014 with a more distant background source. L1014-IRS is therefore one of the lowest-mass sources known to be embedded in a dense core, and is either an extremely young protostar or a proto-brown-dwarf.
Support for this work, part of the Spitzer Space Telescope Legacy Science Program, was provided by NASA.
The author(s) of this abstract have provided an email address for comments about the abstract: thuard@cfa.harvard.edu
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Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, 36 5
© 2004. The American Astronomical Society.