VLA Goulds Belt Survey Taurus-Auriga Complex Source Catalog

This table contains results from a multi-epoch radio study of the Taurus-Auriga complex made with the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (JVLA) at frequencies of 4.5 GHz and 7.5 GHz. A total of 610 sources were detected, 59 of which are related to young stellar objects (YSOs) and 18 to field stars. The properties of 56% of the young stars are compatible with non-thermal radio emission. The authors also show that the radio emission of more evolved YSOs tends to be more non-thermal in origin and, in general, that their radio properties are compatible with those found in other star-forming regions. By comparing their results with previously reported X-ray observations, the authors noticed that YSOs in Taurus-Auriga follow a Guedel-Benz relation with a scaling factor, kappa, of 0.03, as they previously suggested for other regions of star formation. In general, YSOs in Taurus-Auriga and in all the previous studied regions seem to follow this relation with a dispersion of ~1 dex. Finally, the authors propose that most of the remaining sources are related with extragalactic objects but provide a list of 46 unidentified radio sources whose radio properties are compatible with a YSO nature (identified in this implementation of their catalog by values for the parameter radio_yso_flag of &#39;Y&#39;). The observations were obtained with the JVLA of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in its B and BnA configuration. Two frequency sub-bands, each 1 GHz wide, and centered at 4.5 and 7.5 GHz, respectively, were recorded simultaneously. The observations were obtained in three different time periods (February 25/26/28 to March 6, April 12/17/20/25, and April 30 to May 1/5/14/22, all in 2011) typically separated from one another by a month: see Table 1 of the reference paper for more details. For their study, the authors observed 127 different target fields distributed across the cloud complex (Figure 1 of the reference paper). The fields were chosen to cover previously known YSOs. In 33 of those fields, the authors could observe more than one YSO target, while in the remaining 94 fields, only one YSO was targeted. In most cases, the infrared evolutionary class (i.e., Classes I, II, or III) or T Tauri evolutionary status (classical or weak line) of the targeted sources was known from the literature. The final images covered circular areas of 8.8 and 14.3 arcminutes in diameter, for the 7.5 and 4.5 GHz sub-bands, respectively, and were corrected for the effects of the position-dependent primary beam response. The noise levels reached for each individual observation was about ~40 &micro;Jy and ~30 &micro;Jy, at 4.5 GHz and7.5 GHz, respectively. The visibilities of the three, or two, observations obtained for each field were concatenated to produce a new image with a lower noise level (of about ~25 &micro;Jy at 4.5 GHz and ~18 &micro;Jy at 7.5 GHz). The angular resolution of ~1 arcsecond (see the synthesized beam sizes in Table 1 of the reference paper) allows an uncertainty in position of ~0.1 arcseconds or better. In the observed area, there are a total of 196 known YSOs.The first step was the identification of radio sources in the observed fields. The authors follow the procedure and criteria presented by Dzib et al. (2013, ApJ, 775, 63) who consider a detection as firm if the sources have a flux larger than 4 times the noise level and there is a counterpart known at another wavelength, else they require a flux which is 5 times the noise level. The identification was done using the images corresponding to the concatenation of the observed epochs, which provides the highest sensitivity. From this, a total of 609 sources were detected. Of these sources, 215 were only detected in the 4.5 GHz sub-band, while six were only detected in the 7.5 GHz sub-band. The remaining 388 sources were detected in both sub-bands. The authors searched the literature for previous radio detections, and for counterparts at X-ray, optical, near-infrared, and mid-infrared wavelengths. The search was done using SIMBAD, and accessed all the major catalogs. They considered a radio source to be associated with a counterpart at another wavelength if the separation between the two was below the combined uncertainties of the two data sets. This was about 1.0 arcsecond for the optical and infrared catalogs, but could be significantly larger for some of the radio catalogs (for instance, the NVSS has a positional uncertainty of about 5 arcseconds). They found that only 120 of the sources detected here had previously been reported at radio wavelengths, while the other 491 are new radio detections. On the other hand, the authors found a total of 270 counterparts at other wavelengths. In the literature, 18 are classified as field stars, 49 as extragalactic, 1 is classified as either a star or an extragalactic source in different surveys, 49 are classified as YSOs, 11 are classified as either YSO and extragalactic, and the remaining 143 sources are unclassified. Note that 56 sources were previously known at radio wavelengths but do not have known counterparts at other frequencies. As a consequence, the number of sources that were previously known (at any frequency) is 327, while 284 of the sources in this sample are reported here for the first time. This table was created by the HEASARC in July 2015 based on electronic versions of Tables 1, 4 and 5 from the reference paper, which were obtained from the ApJ web site. This is a service provided by NASA HEASARC .

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Organization: National Aeronautics and Space Administration