Searching for Star Formation in the Smith Cloud (2013)
Undergraduates: Ashley Baker, David Stark
Faculty Advisor: Sheila Kannappan
Department: Physics & Astronomy
Recent discoveries of star formation in regions previously thought impossible implies new criteria for where stars can form. The Smith Cloud, a high velocity cloud (HVC) primarily comprised of neutral hydrogen located 12 kpc away in the halo of the Milky Way, meets these criteria by having a large reservoir of gas and the tidal pull of the Milky Way as a mechanism for perturbing the gas. We obtained GALEX NUV magnitudes for stars in the field of the Smith Cloud. These sources were matched with WISE and 2MASS catalogs to obtain infrared magnitudes. We determined the expected colors of young stars in these wavelength bands using synthetic spectral libraries. By comparing the observed UV and IR colors of stars to the expected colors of young stars, while also comparing star positions to existing 21cm data, we aim to isolate possible recent star formation in the Smith Cloud.