Deep Imaging Surveys of Star-forming Clouds. III. Herbig-Haro Objects in the Perseus Molecular Cloud

Abstract

We present a catalog of 72 new Herbig-Haro (HH) objects discovered in the Perseus molecular cloud. There are 69 previously cataloged HH objects in this region, and the new discoveries bring the total number of known HH objects in Perseus to 141. Individual outflows often contain several distinct HH objects. These observations demonstrate that the Perseus molecular cloud is one of the most active star-forming regions in the solar vicinity. We explore different methods for probing the momentum injection rate of outflows and examine whether outflows can drive turbulence within the molecular cloud. On the scale of the entire Perseus cloud, the shocks produced by outflows from young stars may not inject momentum at a sufficient rate to counter the rate at which momentum decays. However, intense outflow activity within individual cloud cores with high star formation rates, such as NGC 1333, may be sufficient to locally support or even disrupt the core.