Clustering properties of intermediate and high-mass Young Stellar Objects

Author(s)
Miguel Vioque, Manuel Cavieres, Michelangelo Pantaleoni González, Álvaro Ribas, René D. Oudmaijer, Ignacio Mendigutía, Lena Kilian, Héctor Cánovas, Michael A. Kuhn
Abstract

We have selected 337 intermediate and high-mass YSOs ($1.5$ to $20$ M$_{\odot}$) well-characterised with spectroscopy. By means of the clustering algorithm HDBSCAN, we study their clustering and association properties in the Gaia DR3 catalogue as a function of stellar mass. We find that the lower mass YSOs ($1.5-4$ M$_{\odot}$) have clustering rates of $55-60\%$ in Gaia astrometric space, a percentage similar to the one found in the T Tauri regime. However, intermediate-mass YSOs in the range $4-10$ M$_{\odot}$ show a decreasing clustering rate with stellar mass, down to $27\%$. We find tentative evidence suggesting that massive YSOs ($>10$ M$_{\odot}$) often appear $-$yet not always$-$ clustered. We put forward the idea that most massive YSOs form via a mechanism that demands many low-mass stars around them. However, intermediate-mass YSOs form in a classical core-collapse T Tauri way, yet they do not appear often in the clusters around massive YSOs. We also find that intermediate and high-mass YSOs become less clustered with decreasing disk emission and accretion rate. This points towards an evolution with time. For those sources that appear clustered, no major correlation is found between their stellar properties and the cluster sizes, number of cluster members, cluster densities, or distance to cluster centres. In doing this analysis, we report the identification of 55 new clusters. We present tabulated all the derived cluster parameters for the considered intermediate and high-mass YSOs.

Organisation(s)
Department of Astrophysics
Journal
The Astronomical Journal
Volume
166
ISSN
0004-6256
Publication date
11-2023
Peer reviewed
Yes
Austrian Fields of Science 2012
103003 Astronomy, 103004 Astrophysics
Keywords
Portal url
https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/en/publications/abb1c181-dee2-41e2-846f-ae83776a43fb