Disk dissipation, giant planet formation and star-formation-rate fluctuations in the past three-million-year history of Gould's Belt

TL;DR

This study analyzes the star formation history in Gould's Belt over the past three million years by examining young stellar objects' spectral energy distributions, revealing diverse star formation rate fluctuations and their possible large-scale driving forces.

Contribution

It introduces a new SED staging scheme based on spectral index features, providing insights into disk dissipation, planet formation, and star formation rate fluctuations in nearby protoclusters.

Findings

Star formation rate fluctuated between 20% and 60% over 3 Myr.

Spatially close protoclusters exhibit similar SFR fluctuation trends.

No correlation between average SFR or number of episodes and fluctuation amplitude.

Abstract

Although episodic star formation (SF) had been suggested for nearby SF regions, a panoramic view to the latest episodic SF history in the solar neighborhood is still missing. By uniformly constraining the slope $\alpha$ of infrared spectral energy distributions (SEDs) of young stellar objects (YSOs) in the 13 largest Gould's Belt (GB) protoclusters surveyed by Spitzer Space Telescope, we have constructed a cluster-averaged histogram of $\alpha$ representing YSO evolution lifetime as a function of the $\alpha$ value. Complementary to the traditional SED classification scheme (0, I, F, II, III) that is based on different $\alpha$ values, a staging scheme (A,B,C,D,E) of SED evolution is advised on the basis of the $\alpha$ statistical features that can be better matched to the physical stages of disk dissipation and giant planet formation. This has also allowed us to unravel the fluctuations of star formation rate (SFR) in the past three-million-year (3 Myr) history of these GB protoclusters. Diverse evolutionary patterns such as single peak, double peaks and on-going acceleration of SFR are revealed. The SFR fluctuations are between $20\%\sim60\%$ ($\sim40\%$ on average) and no dependence on the average SFR or the number of SFR episodes is found. However, spatially close protoclusters tend to share similar SFR fluctuation trends, indicating that the driving force of the fluctuations should be at size scales beyond the typical cluster sizes of several parsec.