The James Clerk Maxwell Telescope Legacy Survey of Nearby Star‐forming Regions in the Gould Belt

Abstract

This paper describes a James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) legacy survey that has been awarded roughly 500 hrs of observing time to be carried out from 2007 to 2009. In this survey we will map with SCUBA-2 (Submillimetre Common User Bolometer Array 2) almost all of the well-known low-mass and intermediate-mass star-forming regions within 0.5 kpc that are accessible from the JCMT. Most of these locations are associated with the Gould Belt. From these observations we will produce a flux-limited snapshot of star formation near the Sun, providing a legacy of images, as well as point-source and extended-source catalogues, over almost 700 square degrees of sky. The resulting images will yield the first catalogue of prestellar and protostellar sources selected by submillimetre continuum emission, and should increase the number of known sources by more than an order of magnitude. We will also obtain CO maps with the array receiver HARP (Heterodyne Array Receiver Programme), in three CO isotopologues, of a large typical sample of prestellar and protostellar sources. We will then map the brightest hundred sources with the SCUBA-2 polarimeter (POL-2), producing the first statistically significant set of polarization maps in the submillimetre. The images and source catalogues will be a powerful reference set for astronomers, providing a detailed legacy archive for future telescopes, including ALMA, Herschel and JWST.Subject headings: ISM

The TOP-SCOPE Survey of Planck Galactic Cold Clumps: Survey Overview and Results of an Exemplar Source, PGCC G26.53+0.17

“…We excluded regions targeted as part of the previous Galactic plane (Moore et al 2015) or Gould Belt surveys (Ward- Thompson et al 2007) at the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT 79 ) because these locations have been extensively observed by other telescopes (e.g., JCMT, NRO 45 m, and PMO 14 m) both by molecular line and by dust continuum emission observations. The TOP survey is therefore highly complementary to these previous surveys.…”

“…The JCMT data reduction methods are similar to those used in the JCMT Gould Belt survey and JCMT transient survey (Ward-Thompson et al 2007;Mairs et al 2015Mairs et al , 2017Herczeg et al, submitted). The data reduction procedure was performed using the iterative mapmaking technique makemap in the SMURF package of the Starlink software Currie et al 2014).…”

HARP: a submillimetre heterodyne array receiver operating on the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope

“…Shown in two views in figure 17 is a 0.5x0.5 square degree map, with a pixel size of 7.5x7.5 square arcseconds and a velocity resolution of 0.42 kms -1 , observed in 12 CO towards the low mass star forming region NGC1333. There are 257x257x2048 pixels in the map, or 1.3x10 8 in total. In Figure 17(a), the morphology of emission is shown, in an integrated intensity image, overlaid with average spectra from several tens of pixels.…”

“…CO are important tracers of the kinematics of star forming regions, and this observing mode is being exploited by the JCMT Gould Belt Legacy Survey [8]. High spatial and velocity resolution are vital in studying the detailed morphology and dynamics of small, clumpy, fragmented core regions, while wide-field imaging is crucial in studying the molecular outflows and the extent of the turbulent interaction across star forming regions.…”

Low-mass Star Formation: Observations

“…The Spitzer-based surveys will soon by joined by a complete survey with Herschel spanning the wavelengths between mid-infrared and millimeter (André et al 2010 and André in this volume). Sometime later, the same clouds will be surveyed completely in millimeter continuum with SCUBA-2 on the JCMT (Ward- Thompson et al 2007). …”