The Origin and Evolution of Rich Clusters (OERC)

Massive stars play a vital role in the star formation process, yet their own formation and their effects on subsequent generations of star formation is not well understood. To improve our understanding, we have begun a detailed study of massive and active star formation regions in giant molecular clouds outside the Galactic Center. One of the main goals of this study is to identify and classify the Young Stellar Objects (YSOs) in each region by using Spitzer Space Telescope IRAC & MIPS data, Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) and Hershel archival data. Following this,YSO clusters will be identified based on spatial distributions of the detected sources. Studying clusters with different evolutionary stages will help us to understand the formation and evolution processes from beginning to end. This study will also provide significant information on how massive stars interact with their environment and how they affect the low-mass star formation in the cloud.

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This work was supported in part by NASA Grant NNX12AI60G
Last updated: Tuesday, 23-Oct-2018 10:34:05 EDT