A wide survey for circumstellar disks in the Lupus complex

TL;DR

This study conducts a comprehensive wide-area survey of the Lupus complex using Gaia data, identifying 98 new young stellar objects with disks, and revealing that Lupus and UCL are part of a continuous star-forming region.

Contribution

It provides the first extensive, multi-region survey of YSOs in Lupus and surrounding areas, combining Gaia and infrared data to characterize their ages, disks, and spatial distribution.

Findings

Identified 98 new disk-bearing young stars in Lupus.

Discovered a continuous population linking Lupus and UCL groups.

Found YSOs with ages from 1 to 15 Myr and masses from 0.05 to 0.5 solar masses.

Abstract

Previous star formation studies have, out of necessity, often defined a population of young stars confined to the proximity of a molecular cloud. Gaia allows us to examine a wider, three-dimensional structure of nearby star forming regions, leading to a new understanding of their history. We present a wide-area survey covering 494 square degrees of the Lupus complex, a prototypical low-mass star forming region. Our survey includes all known molecular clouds in this region as well as parts of the Upper Scorpius (US) and Upper Centaurus Lupus (UCL) groups of the Sco-Cen complex. We combine Gaia DR2 proper motions and parallaxes as well as ALLWISE mid-infrared photometry to select young stellar objects (YSOs) with disks. The YSO ages are inferred from Gaia color-magnitude diagrams, and their evolutionary stages from the slope of the spectral energy distributions. We find 98 new disk-bearing sources. Our new sample includes objects with ages ranging from 1 to 15 Myr and masses ranging from 0.05 to 0.5 solar masses , and consists of 56 sources with thick disks and 42 sources with anemic disks. While the youngest members are concentrated in the clouds and at distances of 160 pc, there is a distributed population of slightly older stars that overlap in proper motion, spatial distribution, distance, and age with the Lupus and UCL groups. The spatial and kinematic properties of the new disk-bearing YSOs indicate that Lupus and UCL are not distinct groups. Our new sample comprises some of the nearest disks to Earth at these ages, and thus provides an important target for follow-up studies of disks and accretion in very low mass stars, for example with ALMA and ESO-VLT X-Shooter.