Circumstellar Disk Evolution Across the Stellar Mass Spectrum in the Upper Scorpius OB Association

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Most 1 Myr old solar-type stars are surrounded by optically thick circumstellar accretion disks that undoubtedly represent the formation sites of planetary systems. Based on Spitzer and ground-based surveys from near-infrared to submillimeter wavelengths, it is becoming increasingly clear that by an age of 10 Myr, the reservoir of primordial small dust grains in disks has been drastically depleted over all orbital radii. If planet formation is a common outcome of the star formation process, evidently the time period between 1 and 10 Myr represents the critical evolutionary stage where the raw disk material is converted into larger bodies. We therefore propose a comprehensive, joint Spitzer-NOAO photometric survey spanning 0.4 to 70 microns of 208 members of the 3-5 Myr old Upper Scorpius OB association. Upper Sco contains the largest identified sample of stars in this age range, and at a distance of 145 pc, is a factor of three closer than the next populous OB association of comparable age. By surveying a large sample of stars over the full range of stellar masses (0.1 to 15 solar masses), our proposed survey will: i) measure the frequency of disks as a function of stellar mass soon after stars have emerged from the parental molecular cloud; ii) determine the diversity of disk architectures based on the shape of the spectral energy distribution; and iii) establish the evolutionary pathways of circumstellar disks by comparing the Upper Sco results with existing Spitzer surveys of young (1 Myr) stars in molecular clouds. No other Spitzer survey probes the full range of stellar masses in this critical age range of disk evolution at the proposed sensitivity.

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