Rubin LSST observing strategies to maximize volume and uniformity coverage of Star Forming Regions in the Galactic Plane

TL;DR

This paper assesses how Rubin LSST survey strategies can optimize the detection and mapping of young stellar populations and star-forming regions in the Milky Way's Galactic Plane, enhancing our understanding of galaxy structure and star formation.

Contribution

It introduces a metric to estimate young star detection in Rubin LSST data and evaluates how different survey strategies affect this capability.

Findings

Rubin LSST will significantly increase the volume of detectable young stars.

Survey strategy impacts the number of star-forming regions identified.

Optimized strategies improve the completeness of young stellar population maps.

Abstract

A complete map of the youngest stellar populations of the Milky Way in the era of all-sky surveys, is one of the most challenging goals in modern astrophysics. The characterisation of the youngest stellar component is crucial not only for a global overview of the Milky Way structure, of the Galactic thin disk, and its spiral arms, but also for local studies. In fact, the identification of the star forming regions (SFRs) and the comparison with the environment in which they form are also fundamental to put them in the context of the surrounding giant molecular clouds and to understand still unknown physical mechanisms related to the star and planet formation processes. In 10 yrs of observations, Vera C. Rubin Legacy Survey of Space and Time (Rubin-LSST) will achieve an exquisite photometric depth that will allow us to significantly extend the volume within which we will be able to discover new SFRs and to enlarge the domain of a detailed knowledge of our own Galaxy. We describe here a metrics that estimates the total number of young stars with ages t < 10 Myr and masses >0.3M$_\odot$ that will be detected with the Rubin LSST observations in the gri bands at a 5 {\sigma} magnitude significance. We examine the results of our metrics adopting the most recent simulated Rubin-LSST survey strategies in order to evaluate the impact that different observing strategies might have on our science case.