C-WAYS Bigger Picture and Goals

The big goal

We have WISE data for 3 patches of sky likely to harbor young stars: BRC 27, BRC 34, and BRC 38.

One of the signatures of young stars is that they have "more infrared than you'd expect" (e.g., they are redder than you expect) because of their circumstellar disk. We will use this property, as seen in the WISE data (as combined with data from some other archives), to identify new CANDIDATE young stars. The word "candidate" is important, because there is likely to be contamination in our sample from things that have colors that make them look like young stars, but they are actually not young stars. Most likely, the contaminants will be active galactic nuclei (AGN) in the distant background. The word "new" is also important -- there have been previous searches for young stars in these regions, so we need to make sure that we understand what has been done before so that we can compare what we did to what other people did, and make sure that we are not, say, announcing "OMG 30 new young stars!!!1!" when in reality 25 of them were found before by someone else, and we are rediscovering them -- rediscovering them independently, mind you, but rediscovering them nonetheless.

We will attempt to "compare and contrast" our results in these three BRCs with the results from last year's NITARP team (which worked with just the Spitzer data in 2 of these 3 regions). Ideally, we will also extend this discussion to the rest of the literature.

The big question driving all of this is - Why do certain stars like our Sun 'choose' to form planets? What makes that happen? Because we can't watch a single star from start to finish, and then set it up again, perturb it in a different way, and watch it go from start to finish again, we have to assemble as many stars as possible in as many different environments in the hopes that we can statistically unravel what is going on. This is why we are looking for new young stars.

The concrete goal

We have to come up with a science poster (and an education one) for the Long Beach AAS in Jan 2013. BUT because the posters can be simple or complex, this goal is a little squishy, perhaps squishier than you might be comfortable with. What I describe here (and elsewhere on the wiki) is the kind of goal I would give a grad student. But getting through even a part of it (rather than all of it) is still a success!! This may be hard to really internalize, but it's true.

The overall "story arc"

OK, so I've done this a few times before. :*) There are three potentially useful pages on the wiki with the "overall story arc" or "to-do list" describing the major tasks we have to accomplish towards actually reducing our data and analyzing it. The Working with L1688 page (from 2008) tries to explain the 'story arc' by using a cluster similar to the ones we were studying to demonstrate the tasks. The more recent Working with CG4+SA101 page (from 2010) goes through the actual region that that group studied. The even more recent Working with the BRCs page (from 2011) goes through those two regions that that group studied. I found that being concrete was better than being abstract, so there will be a Working with the C-WAYS data page that has been fully updated.

The important part is that there are lots of exit ramps off this particular highway. If you get through only a few of those tasks, but you really understand them, that's fine! If we get through them all, that's fantastic. I expect we as a group will get most of the way through them before we have to write the poster.

The timeline

At our workshop in January, I talked about a global timeline for an entire NITARP project. Look here (link to the CoolCosmos site) for the document I distributed at the January workshop. IMPORTANT NOTES: (1) This is a schedule in the ideal case. Your mileage may vary. (2) This includes everything for the entire cycle, including applications, so that I can give it to other people and have the entire thing make sense. (We're fundraising and recruiting here too.) (3) This includes some deadlines that we've already blown (e.g., it has place holders for some notional work that would have happened in the Fall before the AAS), and some future notional things that we hope will happen but that may not happen, depending on available resources. These uncertain things are indicated by wording such as "possible check-in" or "possible survey", etc..

The important dates are:

• Apr-June - background work
• June-Aug - summer visits, learn and start analysis
• Sep-Oct - continue analysis
• Oct? - AAS abstracts due
• Oct-Nov - finish analysis
• Dec - write posters
• Jan - present them!