Intermediate-Mass Star-Forming Regions: What are the Most Massive Stars Formed?

Details Intermediate-Mass Star-Forming Regions: What are the Most Massive Stars Formed? Intermediate-Mass Star-Forming Regions: What are the Most Massive Stars Formed?

Aug 2010

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2010noao.prop..229k&link_type=abstract

NOAO Proposal ID #2010B-0229

Computer Science

Scientific paper

High-mass star formation cannot be viewed as simply a scaled-up version of the paradigm for low-mass star formation. The high-mass regime (M> 10 Msun) appears to require significant differences in cloud fragmentation, accretion, radiation, turbulence, and overall molecular density compared to the low-mass regime. We have identified a sample of intermediate-mass star-forming regions (IM SFRs) hosting embedded clusters that straddle the boundary of these two regimes and can be used to understand the factors that govern the transition between these extremes. Most notable among these factors is the possibility of a critical cloud mass column density that appears to divide high-mass SFRs from IM SFRs. Yet, the very nature of IM SFRs and their stellar content are almost completely unknown, primarily because of the previous difficulty in identifying such objects. We propose HK band spectroscopy of the brightest stellar sources near nine IM SFRs to identify probable members, confirm the IM nature of the most massive stars, and characterize their evolutionary state. Three nights with FLAMINGOS on the 4 m (or equivalent IR spectrograph) will suffice to obtain classification spectra and several spectral diagnostics sensitive to accretion for at least 8-10 stars per object.

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