C-CWEL/Rebull

C-CWEL (Continuing Cool WISE ExpLoration of BRC 38): Continuing on some work started by the C-WAYS team last year, this team is using Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) infrared images to search for newly forming stars in bright rimmed cloud (BRC) 38.

Stars are born in clusters within cold clouds of interstellar gas and dust known as giant molecular clouds.  Once high-mass stars form, they can move the material around, and create HII regions.  Bright rimmed clouds (BRCs) are dense clumps of gas and dust within HII regions at the edges of molecular clouds; the clouds themselves are dark but their rims are bright in the optical from illumination by the nearby bright O or B stars.  These BRCs may be host to lower-mass star formation triggered by these massive stars.  The young stellar objects (YSOs) that may be found in the BRCs are often hidden by the dark cloud.

The central ~5’x5’ region of BRC 38 (21h40m02.2s +58d20m43s [J2000]) has been studied in many wavelengths from X-rays with Chandra (Getman et al. 2007) to Spitzer bands (Choudhury et al. 2010). These authors have identified confirmed YSOs and candidate YSOs. Our investigation seeks to look for more YSOs by including WISE (Widefield Infrared Survey Explorer) data in a 20 arcminute radius centered on BRC 38. The primary WISE data set will be supplemented with data from the Two-micron All Sky Survey (2MASS; JHK_s bands), the Isaac Newton Telescope and Photometric H-Alpha Survey (IPHAS; riHα bands), and other data available in the literature in the central region. We will include the Spitzer data discussed in Choudhury et al. (2010), but also serendipitously obtained Spitzer data flanking the region but unreported by Choudhury et al. (2010).  We will identify objects as potential candidate YSOs from their infrared (IR) colors; we will examine images of the objects, construct color-color and color-magnitude diagrams, and construct spectral energy distributions (SEDs) to assess each candidate object individually. We will compare the lists of YSO candidates from the literature with the YSO candidates that we find in the BRC 38 region, and we expect to find more YSO candidates in the greater BRC 38 region.