L1688/Rebull

This team is using Herschel data to look for young stars in L1688.

This study will be looking for new candidate young stars within the star-forming region of Rho Ophiuchus, more specifically in a sub-region of this molecular cloud called L1688, or Lynds Dark Nebula 1688.  The goal of our study is to identify candidate young stellar object (YSO) sources from Herschel Space Observatory data, as well as support the greater understanding of the variety, evolution, and variability of young stars.  Our search for young stars will focus on optical, infrared (IR), and submillimeter data from PanSTARRS, 2MASS, Spitzer/IRAC & MIPS, WISE, and Herschel/PACS & SPIRE.   We will merge the catalogs across all available wavelengths but focus our efforts on mid-IR, far-IR, and submillimeter wavelengths.   The bulk of our efforts will focus on incorporating the recently released Herschel High Level Data Products (HHLDP), taking the photometry measurements and merging this work with the existing catalog.  We will still need to do our own photometry in many cases, because the sources are not in the released catalogs. We will make color-color and color magnitude diagrams for the objects to identify candidate YSOs.  We will inspect images (where possible) to ensure good matches across wavelengths and compare our photometry work to existing catalogs to better ensure quality data.  We will also construct spectral energy distributions (SEDs) for each candidate YSO in order to better assess whether or not the objects are likely reliable YSOs, and to compare them to the literature inventory of YSOs in this region.  This work is important in the greater context of understanding stellar evolution and the physical processes that drive star formation. Because the earliest phases of star formation are comparatively brief, relatively few objects are known from the earliest phases of star formation. This work will look for these objects in particular, as well as support further studies with an expanded candidate young star list in L1688, incorporating Herschel data into existing catalogs.