Tesis
BLAST: A study of the Earliest Stages of High-Mass Star Formation in Cygnus X.
Autor
Morales Ortíz, Jorge L.
Morell, Gerardo (Consejero)
Institución
Resumen
Master degree Thesis Stars form from the gravitational collapse of massive clouds of gas and dust in the
interstellar medium. Although massive stars play an important role in determining the
evolution of galaxies, our understanding of their formation is still relatively poor.
Molecular clouds can be observed through the dust thermal continuum emission and the
line emission of molecules. In this work we present a multi-wavelength study of the
compact structures in the Cygnus X region. We have combined data from the Balloonborne
Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope (BLAST), with archival data from
millimeter to mid-infrared wavelengths. We have thus constrained the spectral energy
distribution of 184 high-mass young objects found by BLAST and estimated their physical properties, finding that these sources are in various evolutionary phases. We have also identified the most likely candidates of high-mass starless cores, which represent the earliest stages of high-mass star formation.