Description: The formation of star clusters are widely attributed to the gravitational coalescence of a progenitor star forming molecular cloud. Intuitively, one may expect cluster members would inherit some rotation due to the global motion of the molecular cloud, such as reported by Corsaro et al. (2017) and Kovacs (2018). However, due to the highly turbulent nature of star formation—consequently, cluster formation—previous studies such as Jackson & Jeffries (2010) have concluded that spin distributions of cluster members are isotropically—randomly—distributed. In either case, correlation of the spin alignment may lead into insight into the initial conditions of the star-forming cloud and deserves some attention.
Here we employ a potentially more rigorous statistical framework for analyzing the spin distribution of Pleiades cluster members and evaluate it using exquisite data from the GAIA DR2 (Gaia Collaboration et al. 2018), 2MASS (Skrutskie et al. 2006), and K2 (Rebull et al. 2016) surveys.
Date: June 2019
Mentor: Dr. Kento Masuda
Honors & Award(s):
- Princeton National Astronomy Consortium (NAC) Research Intern
Publications:
Project Github: https://github.com/kaimibk/NAC