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| EPoS Contribution |
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MASSES: An SMA Large-Scale Program Surveying Protostars to Reveal How Stars Gain their Mass
Michael Dunham CfA/SAO, Cambridge, US | |
| Low-mass stars form from the gravitational collapse of dense molecular cloud cores. While a general consensus picture of this collapse process has emerged, many details on how mass is transferred from cores to stars remain poorly understood. MASSES (Mass Assembly of Stellar Systems and their Evolution with the SMA), an SMA large-scale program, is surveying all 75 Class 0 and Class I protostars in the nearby Perseus Molecular Cloud in order to reveal the interplay between fragmentation, angular momentum, and mass outflows in regulating accretion and setting the final masses of stars. In this presentation I will highlight key science results from the first two years of MASSES observations. | |
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| Caption: Molecular outflows driven by the 23 protostellar systems observed in the first year of MASSES observations. The red and blues contours show red and blueshifted 12CO(2-1) emission, respectively, whereas the black contours show the 230 GHz continuum emission. All data were observed in the subcompact configuration of the SMA. The scale bar in each panel marks 4500 AU. The systems are ordered in increasing evolutionary stage, with the youngest objects at the top left and the oldest objects at the bottom right. | |
| Collaborators: P. Myers, CfA/SAO, US K. Lee, CfA/SAO, US H. Arce, Yale U, US T. Bourke, SKA, GB A. Goodman, Harvard, US J. Jorgensen, U Copenhagen, DK L. Kristensen, CfA/SAO, US S. Offner, U Mass Amherst, US J. Pineda, MPE, DE J. Tobin, U Leiden, NL E. Vorobyov, U Vienna, AU |
Key publication
Suggested Session: Cores and Collapse |