The Luminosities of Protostars in the Spitzer c2d and Gould Belt Legacy Clouds

TL;DR

This study analyzes the luminosity distribution of 230 protostars in nearby molecular clouds, revealing that many are underluminous due to incomplete data, and discusses implications for star formation theories.

Contribution

The paper provides a comprehensive luminosity distribution for protostars, highlighting the impact of missing data and supporting future theoretical and observational work.

Findings

Protostars' luminosities range from 0.01 to 69 Lsun.

Many protostars lack far-infrared/submillimeter data, underestimating luminosity.

The dataset's size improves statistical analysis of protostellar luminosities.

Abstract

Motivated by the long-standing "luminosity problem" in low-mass star formation whereby protostars are underluminous compared to theoretical expectations, we identify 230 protostars in 18 molecular clouds observed by two Spitzer Space Telescope Legacy surveys of nearby star-forming regions. We compile complete spectral energy distributions, calculate Lbol for each source, and study the protostellar luminosity distribution. This distribution extends over three orders of magnitude, from 0.01 Lsun - 69 Lsun, and has a mean and median of 4.3 Lsun and 1.3 Lsun, respectively. The distributions are very similar for Class 0 and Class I sources except for an excess of low luminosity (Lbol < 0.5 Lsun) Class I sources compared to Class 0. 100 out of the 230 protostars (43%) lack any available data in the far-infrared and submillimeter (70 um < wavelength < 850 um) and have Lbol underestimated by factors of 2.5 on average, and up to factors of 8-10 in extreme cases. Correcting these underestimates for each source individually once additional data becomes available will likely increase both the mean and median of the sample by 35% - 40%. We discuss and compare our results to several recent theoretical studies of protostellar luminosities and show that our new results do not invalidate the conclusions of any of these studies. As these studies demonstrate that there is more than one plausible accretion scenario that can match observations, future attention is clearly needed. The better statistics provided by our increased dataset should aid such future work.