The age of B59 and the Pipe Nebula: Implications for the Star Formation Timescale

Details The age of B59 and the Pipe Nebula: Implications for the Star Formation Timescale The age of B59 and the Pipe Nebula: Implications for the Star Formation Timescale

Jan 2009

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2009aas...21333705c&link_type=abstract

American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #213, #337.05; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 41, p.399

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The Pipe Nebula is a valuable new laboratory for studying the
earliest stages of star formation. Containing only one small cluster (B59) of 20 young stars, until recently the Pipe had escaped detailed scrutiny despite its proximity ( 130 pc) and size ( 104 M_sun). Studies of dense cores in the Pipe (Rathborne et al. 2008,
Muench et al. 2007, Lada et al. 2008) find that thermal pressure provides the dominant source of support against collapse, with non-thermal support constrained to sub-sonic flows. These cores are also found to be stable, with minimum ages of 1 million years, suggesting that they are evolving quasi-staticly. These observations run counter to the more rapid evolution predicted by star formation theories where turbulence provides the dominant means of support against collapse. Understanding the nature of this seeming conflict between observations and theory is essential to ensuring a proper description of time scale of star formation, and thus the limit to which stellar populations can be considered co-evol.
To shed light on the age of the dense core population in the Pipe, we have made spectroscopic observations of the stellar content of B59, the most evolved core in the Pipe. Measuring stellar temperatures from the spectra of 15 Young Stellar Objects (YSOs), we have created an observational HR diagram for B59; comparing this HR diagram to theoretical pre-main sequence evolutionary tracks, our preliminary results indicate a median stellar age for B59 of 3 Myrs. Analyzing the stellar content of other well known star forming regions in an identical manner provides a complementary relative age calibration, indicating that the YSOs in B59 have ages comparable to YSOs in Rho Ophiuchus, but younger than those in Taurus and Chameleon.

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