CSOLOGO1 CSOLOGO2 Bolocam Captures Views of Star Formation in Early Stages.


  
   A group of astronomers, led by Professor Neal Evans of The University of Texas at Austin, used our millimeter-wave bolometer camera, Bolocam, along with the Spitzer Space Telescope (SST) and other instruments to study star formation processes in different evolutionary stages.  The astronomer group, funded by the SST, is compiling complete examples of star forming regions from molecular cores to planet forming disks.  Bolocam is very sensitive to dense cold clouds in which stars form.  Thus, astronomers can study early phases of star formation using Bolocam.  They combined millimeter wave data from Bolocam and infrared data from the SST to elucidate the processes that control star formation.  These examples provide constraints on theoretical models of the origin of the initial mass function and evolutionary stages. The large sample available from the Cores to Disks (c2d) program provides good statistics on the numbers of objects in various stages, and these can be used to estimate timescales.

 

Figure 1.  Infrared (2 micron) image of the Serpens cluster, centered at the location of the red arrow.  This image mainly shows stars and star clusters.  (Courtesy of Dr. Neal J. Evans II and the c2d team. )




Figure 2. Radio (1millimeter) image of the cluster shown in Figure 1, taken with Bolocam at the CSO.  Bolocam is very sensitive to dense cold clouds that are the sites of star formation.  (Courtesy of Dr. Neal J. Evans II and the c2d team. )



Go back to A Digest of Recent News and Scientific Results at the Caltech Submillimeter Observatory