Taurus catalog

Introduction

In your quest to find new young stars, it is sometimes helpful to understand the color properties of other young stars. The Taurus Molecular Cloud (TMC) is one of the closest star forming regions at only 140 pc away. Because it is so close, it covers a huge portion of the sky (if it were further away it would look small), so it is hard to study "all of" it.

Rebull et al. (2010) studied this region with Spitzer, looking for new young stars over a 44 square degree region. (Remember, the Moon is a quarter square degree, so 44 square degrees is a huge region.) Later, Rebull et al. (2011) studied this region with WISE, also looking for new young stars, but now over 260 square degrees, which is a truly huge region, but covers the extent of the TMC. The Spitzer study included follow-up spectroscopy for many but not all the targets; the WISE study didn't include any spectroscopy, and in fact covers such a large region that some of the apparently young stars we found may in fact be members of adjacent star-forming regions (Pleiades, Perseus, etc.)

In order to inform your search for new YSOs, I'm providing here a flux catalog of all of the Taurus high-confidence members from the Spitzer paper, plus the previously identified objects from the WISE paper. I don't think it would be good to include all of the potential objects from the WISE work, as all of them are unlikely to turn out to be legitimate young star members of Taurus.

File:Fulltauruscatalog.tbl.txt

IMPORTANT NOTES ABOUT THIS FILE

• Not all of the objects have fluxes in all bands, so you will need to be careful about what you use. A value of -9 means no data available.
• Some of the objects only have limits, e.g., the true flux is somewhere above or below the number that is tabulated, as indicated by the greater than or less than sign. For objects where there are some limits, there is an equals sign where there is a real detection so that you can get the column importation correct.
• The objects outside the Spitzer dataset are only those that have 4 bands of WISE coverage, because the WISE paper above only considered objects seen in all four WISE bands. See the WISE paper above for an indication of the footprints.
• There are optical data for a lot of these objects; where I have it, it's in the catalog.
• There are only fluxes provided in the file, all in microJy.
• There is information at the top of the file to help you convert magnitudes from the fluxes provided. Or, you can get the magnitudes out of the papers above. See Units and Central wavelengths and zero points for more information on that.
• The file above is an IPAC table file, which is a plain text file. You can read a plain text file with nearly any editor but this file has a LOT of columns, so you probably want to open it with something that doesn't wrap the lines. You can import into Excel so that you can manipulate the columns.
• YouTube video on what tbl files are, how to access them, and specifically how to import tbl files into xls. (10min)
• This file includes young stars identified via a wide variety of means, not just IR excess. Some of the young stars here do not have IR excesses. You will not be able to find new young stars that don't have IR excesses by searching in the IR. You will need to use something else, like X-rays or Halpha, to find those objects. See Finding cluster members.

Things to do with this file

(after getting it into Excel or any other data manipulation mechanism you want - Google Docs, Python, whatever.)

• Make color-color plots with any combination of colors you want. Take inspiration from published papers (like the ones above, for example). Where do the young stars fall?
• If you have a full catalog from another star-forming region, plot these stars on top of the distribution of points from the other star-forming region. Look for new objects that have similar color properties to these objects.
• Make SEDs for these objects. Put them into classes based on the shape of their SED. Do you get the same numbers I did in the papers above?