Using various telescopes, an international team of astronomers studied IC 1396, a nearby region of ionized atomic hydrogen. The results of the study, published October 21 on arXiv.org, provide important insights into the history and structure of star formation in this region.
Star forming regions are essential for astronomers to better understand the processes of star formation and evolution. Observations of these regions have the potential to expand the list of known stars, protostars, young stellar objects and clusters, which could then be studied extensively in different wavelengths to gain more information about the stages stellar life cycle initials.
Most likely located between 2,830 and 3,080 light-years away in the star-forming bubble of Cepheus, IC 1396 is an HII star-forming region because it contains clouds of ionized atomic hydrogen. The region has a fairly simple structure and is powered by the O HD 206267 multiple star system residing near the geometric center of IC 1396 in the young Trumpler 37 cluster.
Previous observations of IC 1396 have revealed that it also contains Bright Edge Clouds (BRCs) shaped by ultraviolet radiation from HD 206267. These clouds show evidence of the continued formation of stars and are seen by astronomers as excellent laboratories for studying young stars in different evolutionary stages.
Therefore, a group of researchers led by Mara E. Pelayo-Baldárrago from the Autonomous University of Madrid in Spain, inspected IC 1396 and its BRCs using multi-wavelength data from various instruments .
“We are using ground-based spectroscopy, photometry and Gaia EDR3 data to study star formation in IC 1396. We have obtained near-infrared broadband and narrowband imagery to study star-cloud interaction and optical spectra to confirm and classify objects that were young star candidates,” the astronomers wrote in the paper.
The study revealed that the IC 1396 region contains four independent subgroups (designated A, B, E, F), significantly different in proper motion but not in parallax. This finding, along with the spatial distribution of member stars, suggests a complex and varied star formation process in IC 1396.
Further investigation of the four subgroups revealed that they also differ in age. It turned out that the populations on the periphery of subclusters B and E are older (on average) than those of subcluster A.
The study also determined that the distance to IC 1396 is about 3,015 light-years and identified 334 new members of this region. Color-magnitude diagrams indicate that most of these new members are intermediate-to-solar-mass stars. The average age of IC 1396 has been estimated at around 4 million years.
Summarizing the findings, the paper’s authors pointed out that they all point to a multi-episode star formation process in IC 1396.
“The kinematics, age, and evolutionary state differences in source groups within a single cloud suggest that IC1396 has undergone more than one star-forming episode over time due to various mechanisms, although radial velocity differences mean that triggering is not obvious,” they concluded. .
Young open cluster NGC 602 inspected with ALMA
Mara E. Pelayo-Baldárrago et al, Star Formation in IC1396: Kinematics and Subcluster Structure Revealed by Gaia. arXiv:2210.11930v1 [astro-ph.GA]arxiv.org/abs/2210.11930
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Quote: Study sheds more light on the star formation history and structure of IC 1396 (2022, October 31) retrieved October 31, 2022 from https://phys.org/news/2022- 10-star-formation-history-ic.html
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