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NRAO/Socorro Colloquium Series

Laurent Loinard

UNAM

The Gould's Belt Distances Survey: mapping the distribution of star-forming regions in the Milky Way

In the last decade, it has become possible to routinely measure the distance and the velocity vector of young stars located within 500 pc of the Sun with an accuracy of order 1% using Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) techniques. This represents an improvement by more than 1 order of magnitude over what was previously possible, and opens the door to some extremely high accuracy astrophysics. In particular, theoretical pre-main sequence stellar evolutionary models can now be confronted with very accurate observational constraints. The space distribution, and the internal structure and kinematics of star-forming regions, can also be investigated in unprecedented detail. This has important consequences both for star formation and for Galactic structure studies. In this talk, I will review these recent results, and explore their consequences. In particular, I will focus on a legacy VLA/VLBA project that we have initiated in the last year, and that aims at mapping in three dimensions all the nearby regions of star-formation. Early results include the unexpected detection at radio wavelengths of very young brown dwarfs.


September 20, 2013
11:00 am

Array Operations Center Auditorium

All NRAO employees are invited to attend via video, available in Charlottesville Room 230, Green Bank Room 137 and Tucson N525.

Local Host: Amy Mioduszewski

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