Gaia view of low-mass star formation

TL;DR

This paper uses Gaia data to improve distance estimates to nearby star-forming regions and discusses plans to study environmental effects on disk evolution in young stars.

Contribution

It provides new distance measurements for star-forming clouds and introduces a kinematic modeling approach to study environmental impacts on disk evolution.

Findings

New distance estimates for star-forming clouds combining Gaia and extinction data.

Development of a kinematic model to analyze environmental effects on young star disks.

Framework for future Gaia-based studies of star and disk evolution.

Abstract

Understanding how young stars and their circumstellar disks form and evolve is key to explain how planets form. The evolution of the star and the disk is regulated by different processes, both internal to the system or related to their environment. The former include accretion of material onto the central star, wind emission, and photoevaporation of the disk due to high-energy radiation from the central star. These are best studied spectroscopically, and the distance to the star is a key parameter in all these studies. Here we present new estimates of the distance to a complex of nearby star-forming clouds obtained combining TGAS distances with measurement of extinction on the line of sight. Furthermore, we show how we plan to study the effects of the environment on the evolution of disks with Gaia, using a kinematic modelling code we have developed to model young star-forming regions.