Protostars and Planets VI, Heidelberg, July 15-20, 2013

Poster 1K083

A WISE CENSUS OF THE PERSEUS OB2 ASSOCIATION

Azimlu, Mohaddesseh (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics)
Muench, August (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics)
Martinez-Galarza, Rafael (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics)

Abstract:
We have performed a WISE based survey to identify young stellar objects throughout a large 12 by 12 degree area around the Perseus OB2 association (Per OB2) and the spatially co-located Perseus molecular cloud. While this region contains several well studied, active star forming regions and many massive and intermediate mass stars, comprehensive knowledge about the population of low mass stars in the association is lacking. Understanding age, mass and spatial extent of the low mass association members is particularly important because Per OB2, is the second closest OB association to the Sun with an age of less than 15 Myr. We constructed a panchromatic census of this region using WISE, Spitzer and all other optical/infrared all sky surveys this region. If available, we folded in X-ray data that can help to confirm the young but diskless members and to distinguish young sources from background extragalactic objects. We used this panchromatic census to construct spectral energy distributions (SEDs) of about 1 million 2MASS and more than 1.5 million WISE point sources to look for signatures of disk infrared excess emission as a means to identify young stars. We present a detailed analysis of our careful matching of multiple all sky catalogs, our filtering of the merged source catalog for high quality SEDs, basic characterization of these SEDs, and our analysis of low mass population we identified. The overall aim of this project is to characterize the spatial and mass distribution of the objects in this region. This research funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Grant NNX08AJ66G to the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.

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