2004/03/05 by D. K. Ojha, Motohide Tamura, M. Tamura +15 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #Astrophysics and Star Formation Studies #Galaxies: Formation, Evolution, Phenomena #Stellar, planetary, and galactic studies #astro-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1086/420876
published as Astrophys.J. 608 (2004) 797-808 · 30 pages, 11 figures in JPEG format. Accepted for the publication in ApJ. The preprint is also available at http://www.tifr.res.in/~ojha/W3Main.html
arxiv created 2004/03/05 · openalex publication_date 2004/06/11 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
We present a deep JHK s -band imaging survey of the W3 Main star-forming region, using the near-infrared camera SIRIUS mounted on the University of Hawaii 2.2 m telescope. The near-infrared survey covers an area of ~24 arcmin 2 with 10 σ limiting magnitudes of ~19.0, 18.1, and 17.3 in the J , H , and K s bands, respectively. We construct JHK color-color and J versus J - H and K versus H - K color-magnitude diagrams to identify young stellar objects and estimate their masses. Based on these color-color and color-magnitude diagrams, a rich population of young stellar objects is identified that is associated with the W3 Main region. A large number of previously unreported red sources ( H - K > 2) have also been detected around W3 Main. We argue that these red stars are most probably pre-main-sequence stars with intrinsic color excesses. We find that the slope of the K s -band luminosity function (KLF) of W3 Main is lower than the typical values reported for young embedded clusters. The derived slope of the KLF is the same as that found in 1996 by Megeath and coworkers, from which analysis indicated that the W3 Main region has an age in the range of 0.3-1 Myr. Based on the comparison between models of pre-main-sequence stars and the observed color-magnitude diagram, we find that the stellar population in W3 Main is primarily composed of low-mass pre-main-sequence stars. We also report the detection of isolated young stars with large infrared excesses that are most probably in their earliest evolutionary phases.