The Taurus Spitzer Legacy Survey: Taking the Bull by the Horns

Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy

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Scientific paper

One of the star-forming clouds nearest to our Sun is located 140 pc away in Taurus. Lacking dense young stellar clusters and luminous OB stars, the Taurus dark cloud hosts a distributed mode of star formation that has proved particularly amenable to observational and theoretical study. Our team used the Spitzer Space Telescope to image 43 square degrees of the main Taurus molecular cloud in order to take a deep census of young stars and disks to below the deuterium burning limit. Achieving sensitivities 20 times better than ISOCAM at 8 microns and 200 times better than IRAS at 24 microns, these observations help to characterize the lowest luminosity members of the young stellar population: collapsing protostars, young substellar objects, and edge-on disks. In addition, Spitzer's great sensitivity detects many asteroids and reveals a wealth of extragalactic sources beyond these nearby clouds. Our Legacy team has released to the community re-reduced mosaics and source catalogs for the original 29.5 square degrees which include more than 500,000 sources. An additional 14 square degrees observed in 2007 will be released in early 2008. This survey is a central and crucial part of a collaborative multiwavelength study of the Taurus cloud complex that includes data from the recent XMM, CFHT, and SDSS Taurus surveys. The 3.6 - 160 micron photometry obtained from Spitzer allow us to characterize the circumstellar environment of each object, and, in conjunction with optical and NIR photometry, construct a complete luminosity function for the cloud members that will place constraints on the initial mass function.

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