Towards a complete census of young stars in the solar neighbourhood with SkyMapper

TL;DR

This paper discusses plans to identify and study young, low-mass stars within 150 parsecs of the Sun using the SkyMapper telescope, aiming to understand local star formation history and test stellar models.

Contribution

It proposes a comprehensive survey to characterize young stars nearby, addressing gaps in understanding star formation, dispersal, and stellar evolution models.

Findings

Planning to identify numerous young stars within 150 pc

Aiming to test pre-main sequence evolutionary models

Searching for dispersed low-mass objects around clusters

Abstract

In this contribution we outline plans for identifying and characterising numerous young, low-mass stars within 150 pc of the Sun using the new SkyMapper telescope and Southern Sky Survey. We aim to learn more about the star formation history of the solar neighbourhood over the past 5-50 Myr, the dispersal processes involved, as well as testing pre-main sequence evolutionary models and the universality of the stellar Inital Mass Function. Searching for the dispersed halo of low-mass objects predicted to surround the Eta Chamaeleontis cluster will be one of the first goals of the project.