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Published September 20, 2011 | Published
Journal Article Open

A Massive Protostar Embedded in the Scuba Core JCMT 18354-0649S

Abstract

We report the discovery of an extremely red object embedded in the massive SCUBA core JCMT 18354-0649S. This object is not associated with any known radio or far-IR source, though it appears in Spitzer IRAC data obtained as part of the GLIMPSE survey. At shorter wavelengths, this embedded source exhibits an extreme color, K – L' = 6.7. At an assumed distance of 5.7 kpc, this source has a near-IR luminosity of ~1000 L_☉. Its spectral energy distribution (SED) rises sharply from 2.1 μm to 8 μm, similar to that of a Class 0 young stellar object. Theoretical modeling of the SED indicates that the central star has a mass of 6-12 M_☉, with an optical extinction of more than 30. As both inflow and outflow motions are present in JCMT 18354-0649S, we suggest that this deeply embedded source is (1) a massive protostar in the early stages of accretion, and (2) the driving source of a massive molecular outflow evident in HCN J = 3-2 profiles observed toward this region.

Additional Information

© 2011 The American Astronomical Society. Received 2010 September 17; accepted 2011 June 30; published 2011 September 6. M.Z. acknowledges the support from NSFC grant Y011231001 and also from the "Hundred-talent program" of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Y. Wu is grateful for the support of grants 10733030 and 10873019 of NSFC. The United Kingdom Infrared Telescope is operated by the Joint Astronomy Centre (JAC) on behalf of the U.K. Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC). The H-, K-, and L -band imaging reported here were obtained as part of the UKIRT Service Programme. We thank Dr.Watson Varricatt at the JAC for help with near-IR photometry. The JCMT is also operated by the Joint Astronomy Centre on behalf of the U.K. STFC, the National Research Council Canada, and the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research. Caltech Submillimeter Observatory is supported through NSF grant AST-0540882. This work is based in part on observations made with the Spitzer Space Telescope, which is operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, under a contract with NASA. Support for this work was provided by NASA through an award issued by JPL/Caltech for the GLIMPSE360 project (B.W.).We thank the GLIMPSE team (PI: E. Churchwell) for making the IRAC images available on the internet. We also thank the anonymous referee whose comments helped improve the paper.

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August 22, 2023
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