STARS/Rebull

Stellar Teachers and Rebull with SPHEREx -- All-Volunteer NITARP 2026 team studying stars with SPHEREx.

We propose the continued study of potential young stellar objects (YSOs) within the c2d Survey of the Perseus Cloud, utilizing recently acquired data from the SPHEREx space-based observatory. SPHEREx, launched in March 2025, is conducting a two-year all-sky spectroscopic survey from 0.75 to 5.0 μm. Previous studies have been done on various targets within the Perseus molecular cloud, including the work by Rebull et al. (2007), which flagged 23 objects as likely YSOs, studied using Spitzer’s MIPS at 24 μm, 70 μm, and 160 μm. This effort, in combination with studies of the same sources using 2MASS and Spitzer/IRAC, resulted in spectral energy distributions (SEDs) and color-magnitude plots, which helped to isolate potential YSOs from potential galaxies in the
field. SPHEREx will provide spectroscopic data of these targets. The spectra from SPHEREx provide 102 channels of wavelength measurement, which provides enough resolution to distinguish background galaxies from YSOs, and moreover permits identification of major molecular absorption species within the spectra. Our goal is to obtain SPHEREx spectra for the candidate YSOs identified in the MIPS survey of Perseus and add them to other archival photometric data released since 2007 to create new SEDs and color magnitude and color color plots to better assess their potential as YSO candidates. We will also develop curriculum units based on all aspects of this work, from literature searching through identification of lines in the SPHEREx spectra. Members of this team teach in wildly different contexts (8th grade through college, classrooms through planetaria), and as a result, our lesson plans will be diverse and flexible.