Discovering Protostars and their Host Clusters via WISE

Abstract

A hybrid JHKs-W1W2W3W4 high-spectral index (alpha) selection scheme was employed to identify (sub)clusters of class I/f candidate protostars (YSOs) in WISE observations (the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer). n>10^4 candidate YSOs were detected owing to WISE's advantageous all-sky spatial coverage, and a subsample (n~200) of their heavily-obscured host (sub)clusters were correlated with the Avedisova (2002) and Dias et al. (2002) catalogs of star-forming regions. Forthcoming observations from the VVV/UKIDSS surveys shall facilitate the detection of additional protostars and bolster efforts to delineate the Galactic plane, since the campaigns aim to secure deep JHKs photometry for a pertinent fraction of the WISE targets lacking 2MASS detections, and to provide improved data for YSOs near the limits of the 2MASS survey.