Unraveling the Spectral Energy Distributions of Clustered YSOs

Abstract

Despite significant evidence suggesting that intermediate- and high-mass stars form in clustered environments, how stars form when the available resources are shared is still not well understood. A related question is whether the initial mass function (IMF) is in fact universal across galactic environments, or whether it is an average of IMFs that differ, for example, in massive versus low-mass molecular clouds. One of the long-standing problems in resolving these questions and in the study of young clusters is observational: how to accurately combine multiwavelength data sets obtained using telescopes with different spatial resolutions. The resulting confusion hinders our ability to fully characterize clustered star formation. Here we present a new method that uses Bayesian inference to fit the blended spectral energy distributions and images of individual young stellar objects (YSOs) in confused clusters. We apply this method to the infrared photometry of a sample comprising 70 Spitzer -selected, low-mass ( M cl < 100 M ⊙ ) young clusters in the galactic plane, and we use the derived physical parameters to investigate how the distribution of YSO masses within each cluster relates to the total mass of the cluster. We find that for low-mass clusters this distribution is indistinguishable from a randomly sampled Kroupa IMF for this range of cluster masses. Therefore, any effects of self-regulated star formation that affect the IMF sampling are likely to play a role only at larger cluster masses. Our results are also compatible with smoothed particle hydrodynamics models that predict a dynamical termination of the accretion in protostars, with massive stars undergoing this stopping at later times in their evolution.