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Session 49 - Young Stellar Objects.
Display session, Tuesday, January 14
The determination of the spectral energy distribution (SED) of a large sample of sources is critical to obtaining a complete picture of a star forming region. Kenyon amp; Hartmann (1995, ApJS, 101, 117) have done this for the Taurus dark cloud and find that the luminosity functions for both Class I and Class II young stellar objects are similar. This result poses problems for the current star forming theories which predict significant differences between these two populations (Kenyon amp; Hartmann, 1995, and references therein). Greene et al. (1994, ApJ, 434, 614) claim Class I sources are brighter than Class II sources for their sample of 71 objects in the \rho Ophiuchus dark cloud. To determine if this result is truly different than in Taurus or if it is due to selection effects, we have started a project to obtain SEDs for the most complete sample of sources in \rho Oph to date. Our sample comprises 130 of the reddest and brightest sources of the deep JHK survey of Barsony et al. (1996, ApJS, submitted), chosen for their high likelyhood of being cluster members. Of these, 56 have previously been observed at 10\mum (14 with only upper limits). We are surveying these sources at 10\mum using JPL's 0.15\arcsec/pixel MIRLIN instrument (Ressler et al., 1994, Experimental Astronomy, 3, 277) on the Hale 5-m telescope. We have used HIRES processing on the IRAS database to obtain fluxes at longer wavelengths for isolated sources, to provide additional wavelength coverage for the determination of the SED. We present here our first results from this survey, including constructed SEDs of several of our most interesting sources. Our high resolution images have allowed us to separate four close multiple systems where the assumption of a single source would have led to an erroneous SED and therefore, classification.
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