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Published September 1, 2012 | Published
Journal Article Open

Multiwavelength Observations of V2775 Ori, an Outbursting Protostar in L 1641: Exploring the Edge of the FU Orionis Regime

Abstract

Individual outbursting young stars are important laboratories for studying the physics of episodic accretion and the extent to which this phenomenon can explain the luminosity distribution of protostars. We present new and archival data for V2775 Ori (HOPS 223), a protostar in the L 1641 region of the Orion molecular clouds that was discovered by Caratti o Garatti et al. to have recently undergone an order-of-magnitude increase in luminosity. Our near-infrared spectra of the source have strong blueshifted He I λ10830 absorption, strong H_(2)O and CO absorption, and no H I emission, all typical of FU Orionis sources. With data from the Infrared Telescope Facility, the Two Micron All Sky Survey, the Hubble Space Telescope, Spitzer, the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, Herschel, and the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment that span from 1 to 70 μm pre-outburst and from 1 to 870 μm post-outburst, we estimate that the outburst began between 2005 April and 2007 March. We also model the pre- and post-outburst spectral energy distributions of the source, finding it to be in the late stages of accreting its envelope with a disk-to-star accretion rate that increased from ~2 × 10^(–6) M_☉ yr^(–1) to ~10^(–5) M_☉ yr^(–1) during the outburst. The post-outburst luminosity at the epoch of the FU Orionis-like near-IR spectra is 28 L_☉, making V2775 Ori the least luminous documented FU Orionis outburster with a protostellar envelope. The existence of low-luminosity outbursts supports the notion that a range of episiodic accretion phenomena can partially explain the observed spread in protostellar luminosities.

Additional Information

© 2012 American Astronomical Society. Received 2012 January 19; accepted 2012 July 10; published 2012 August 20. Support for this work was provided by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) through awards issued by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology (JPL/Caltech). This paper includes data from Herschel, a European Space Agency (ESA) space observatory with science instruments provided by European-led consortia and with important participation from NASA. We also used the Spitzer Space Telescope and the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC) Infrared Science Archive, which are operated by JPL/Caltech under a contract with NASA. We include observations made under program 11548 of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, obtained at the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc., under NASA contract NAS 5-26555. We include data from the Atacama Pathfinder Experiment, a collaboration between the Max-Planck-Institut für Radioastronomie, the European Southern Observatory, and the Onsala Space Observatory. These data were collected at the European Southern Observatory, Chile, under proposal 088.C-0994. We also made use of the Infrared Telescope Facility (IRTF), which is operated by the University of Hawaii under Cooperative Agreement NNX-08AE38A with NASA, Science Mission Directorate, Planetary Astronomy Program. We reverently acknowledge the cultural significance of the Mauna Kea summit, site of the IRTF, to the indigenous Hawaiian community. This paper makes use of data products from the Two Micron All Sky Survey, which is a joint project of the University of Massachusetts and IPAC/Caltech, funded by NASA and the National Science Foundation; the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, which is a joint project of the University of California, Los Angeles, and JPL/Caltech, funded by NASA; and the Cornell Atlas of Spitzer/IRS Sources, which is a product of the Infrared Science Center at Cornell University, supported by NASA and JPL. The work ofA. S.was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft priority program 1573 ("Physics of the Interstellar Medium"). M.K. acknowledges support from the NSF-REU program of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Toledo (grantPHY-1004649). M.O. acknowledges support from MICINN (Spain) grants AYA2008-06189-C03 and AYA2011-30228-C03-01 (co-funded with FEDER funds). Finally, we are grateful to Barbara Whitney and her collaborators for making their radiative transfer code available to the community and to Lynne Hillenbrand for helpful comments on a draft of this paper.

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