Secondary objectives are to determine the Be x-ray binary content and stellar coronal source distributions in the Galaxy. We will image all young stellar objects within these clouds down to the hydrogen burning limit and classify their types through their near-infrared spectra. The goals of this survey are to determine the number and spatial extent of young stars in the clouds and to measure their ages and masses. The resulting catalogs will be of wide interest and of great use in determining the stellar initial mass function and addressing fundamental questions such as the variation of star formation efficiency and rate from cloud to cloud, the formation of clusters, and sequential star formation. In addition, the calibrated images will provide a detailed, uniform atlas of both the stellar and ionized gas components of these galaxies, which will certainly prove useful for a host of other projects.
Cosmological evolution is mapped using tracers of star formation.
Usually the selection of tracers is biased by stellar luminosity. Since an interstellar medium is a prerequisite for star formation, our survey will uniformly sample all galaxies that could form stars, and hence provide a fair view of the local star formation demographics. Integrated, this yields the local star formation rate density, which will be used as benchmark to estimate the bias in other H-alpha samples. This survey will also provide high resolution images of the star formation morphology over a wide range of galaxies, particularly towards irregular dwarfs which are often missed in other studies. The HI content of galaxies combined with the SFR will be used to predict the evolution of the HI mass function and the epoch when the cosmological gas tank runs dry.