INTRINSICALLY RED SOURCES OBSERVED BY SPITZER IN THE GALACTIC MIDPLANE

By Thomas Robitaille, M. Meade, B. Babler, B. Whitney, K. Johnston, R. Indebetouw, Marvin L. Cohen, M. Povich, M. Sewiło, R. Benjamin and 1 more. 2008

178 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present a highly reliable flux-limited census of 18,949 point sources in the Galactic midplane that have intrinsically red mid-infrared colors. These sources were selected from the Spitzer Space Telescope Galactic Legacy Infrared Midplane Survey Extraordinaire (GLIMPSE) I and II surveys of 274 deg2 of the Galactic midplane, and consist mostly of high- and intermediate-mass young stellar objects (YSOs) and asymptotic giant branch (AGB) stars. The selection criteria were carefully chosen to minimize the effects of position-dependent sensitivity, saturation, and confusion. The distribution of sources on the sky and their location in the Infrared Array Camera and the Multiband Image Photometer for Spitzer 24 μm color–magnitude and color–color space are presented. Using this large sample, we find that YSOs and AGB stars can be mostly separated by simple color–magnitude selection criteria into approximately 50%–70% of YSOs and 30%–50% of AGB stars. Planetary nebulae and background galaxies together represent at most 2%–3% of all the red sources. 1004 red sources in the GLIMPSE II region, mostly AGB stars with high mass-loss rates, show significant (⩾0.3 mag) variability at 4.5 and/or 8.0 μm. With over 11,000 likely YSOs and over 7000 likely AGB stars, this is to date the largest uniform census of AGB stars and high- and intermediate-mass YSOs in the Milky Way Galaxy.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ed1344541c7a3c25d0ae62d16c78e2360213ada0

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Citations in the corpus

The spatial distribution of star formation in the solar neighbourhood: do all stars form in dense clusters? (2010, background): “Spitzer is not completely free of contamination when identifying YSOs, i.e. AGBs/Be stars (Cieza et al. 2010; Robitaille et al. 2008) and galaxies (Gutermuth et al. 2008; Evans et al. 2009).”
A gallery of bubbles. The nature of the bubbles observed by Spitzer and what ATLASGAL tells us about the surrounding neutral material (2010, background): “They can be identified based on their infrared (IR) colours (see the discussion in Robitaille et al. 2008).”
WIDE-FIELD INFRARED SURVEY EXPLORER OBSERVATIONS OF THE EVOLUTION OF MASSIVE STAR-FORMING REGIONS (2012, background): “…from non-YSO sources, including starforming galaxies, broad-line active galactic nuclei (AGNs), unresolved knots of shock emission from outflows colliding with cold cloud material, planetary nebulae, and asymptotic giant branch (AGB) stars (both carbon-rich and oxygen-rich; Robitaille et al. 2008).”
The ATLASGAL survey: a catalog of dust condensations in the Galactic plane (2013, background): “Other studies using similar datasets have also reported this shift (e.g. Schuller et al. 2009; Rosolowsky et al. 2010), like studies using various other tracers of (massive) star-formation, i.e. UC-HII regions, (Bronfman et al. 2000), GLIMPSE YSOs (Robitaille et al. 2008) and molecular gas (Cohen & ”
TOWARD A UNIFICATION OF STAR FORMATION RATE DETERMINATIONS IN THE MILKY WAY AND OTHER GALAXIES (2011, methodology): “These population synthesis models were then used to simulate the Robitaille et al. (2008) catalog of YSOs identified via mid-IR excess emission from the Spitzer Space Telescope GLIMPSE (Galactic Legacy Infrared Mid-Plane Survey Extraordinaire; Churchwell et al. 2009) surveys of the Galactic plane.”
The second data release of the INT Photometric Hα Survey of the Northern Galactic Plane (IPHAS DR2) (2014, background): “Two of our candidates, #1 and #4 in Table 9, have previously been identified as candidate YSOs by Robitaille et al. (2008) and Yu & Wang (2012), respectively.”
ATLASGAL - The APEX telescope large area survey of the galaxy at 870 μm (2009, background): “…have been defined based on various criteria, such as maser emission (e.g., Walsh et al. 1997; Pestalozzi et al. 2005) and infrared (IR) colors (Palla et al. 1991; Molinari et al. 1996; Sridharan et al. 2002; Lumsden et al. 2002; Robitaille et al. 2008), anunbiased sample has not yet been assembled.”