The young stellar population in 30 Doradus

The young stellar population in 30 Doradus

by | Jun 15, 2011 | Daily Paper Summaries

Paper title: Star Formation in 30 Doradus Authors: Guide De Marchi et al. First author’s affiliation: European Space Agency, Space Sciences Department The 30 Doradus star forming region, located 50 kpc away in the Large Magellanic Cloud, is home to the closest super star cluster, R136.  Containing about 2400 OB stars, the star cluster emits about 80 million times more radiation than the sun, with a large fraction of the radiative power coming out as ionizing photons. The star cluster has carved out a bubble of ionized gas, the HII region NGC 2070, and is associated with several supernova remnants, the product of previous generations of massive star formation.While much is known about the properties of the massive stars in the region, relatively little is known about the low-mass pre-main-sequence population.  Assuming the IMF is well-sampled, the vast majority of the stellar mass should in fact be associated with stars about as massive as the sun.  Although these stars should be numerous, they are hard to see directly as they are intrinsically faint and relatively distant. Fortunately, the Hubble Space Telescope recently received an upgrade, making it capable of carrying out the necessary observations.The Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) is Hubble’s new panchromatic camera.  WFC3 can do accurate photometry at high spatial resolution over a large field of view and is very sensitive in the near UV and IR.  This paper focuses on observations in three visual passbands, V-band (centered at 550 nm), I-band (centered at 880 nm), and a narrow-band filter centered on the Hα line.  The authors identify all the stars that occur in all three images and that...
Review Article: Protoplanetary Disks and Their Evolution

Review Article: Protoplanetary Disks and Their Evolution

by | Mar 11, 2011 | Daily Paper Summaries

In a new review article, Jonathan Williams and Lucas Cieza at the Institute for Astronomy (IfA) describe the life-story of protoplanetary disks from formation from collapsing molecular clouds to the end-state of a planetary system. Infrared telescopes like Spitzer and sub-millimeter radio telescopes like the the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope, the Submillimeter Array (SMA), and the Combined Array for Research in Millimeter Astronomy (CARMA) have greatly revolutionized the study of protoplanetary disks because they can probe the emission at the longer wavelengths where the disk emission is strongest.