Abstract Details

Name: Mayank Narang
Affiliation: TIFR
Conference ID: ASI2020_308
Title : Unveiling the photospheres of protostars with Gaia
Authors and Co-Authors : Mayank Narang (TIFR, Mumbai), Manoj P. (TIFR, Mumbai), Tom Megeath (University of Toledo), John Tobin (NRAO), Will Fischer (STScI), Lee Hartmann (University of Michigan), Elise Furlan (IPAC Caltech), Nicole Karnath (University of Toledo)
Abstract Type : Poster
Abstract Category : Stars, ISM and Galaxy
Abstract : The protostellar phase is the earliest phase in the process of star formation. During this stage, most of the final stellar mass is accreted, and the protostellar disk is formed. The protostars are, however, deeply embedded with a line of sight extinction Av ~100 mag and are generally visible only at infrared wavelengths. Protostars drive strong jets that can excavate cavities in the envelope. It is thought that if the cavity is along our line of sight and the opening angle is wide enough, it is possible to observe the photospheres of protostars in the optical and near-infrared wavelengths. In this work, we used a well-characterized sample of protostars from the Herschel Orion Protostellar Survey (HOPS) to search for their visual counterparts in the Gaia DR2 survey. Out of the 330 protostars in the HOPS catalog, we find Gaia counterparts for 59 sources within ~1 arcsec. We further complement the Gaia data with high spatial resolution (~0.1 arcsec) ALMA continuum observations at 0.88 mm. We can rule out the possibility of the optical emission being from a close-in binary as the Gaia and ALMA positions match within 0.1 arcsec. Further, we model the SED of these protostars using a radiative transfer and envelope model to better constrain the protostellar parameters like the opening angle, the inclination angle, the dust mass, and the line of sight extinction. We will present our analysis and results at the ASI 2020 meeting.