The Red MSX Source Survey: The Massive Young Stellar Population of Our Galaxy

Abstract

We present the Red MSX Source (RMS) Survey, the largest statistically selected catalog of young massive protostars and HII regions to date. We outline the construction of the catalog using mid and near infrared color selection, as well as the detailed follow up work at other wavelengths, and at higher spatial resolution in the infrared. We show that within the adopted selection bounds we are more than 90% complete for the massive protostellar population, with a positional accuracy of the exciting source of better than 2 arcseconds. We briefly summarize some of the results that can be obtained from studying the properties of the objects in the catalog as a whole, and find evidence that the most massive stars form: (i) preferentially nearer the Galactic centre than the anti-centre; (ii) in the most heavily reddened environments, suggestive of high accretion rates; and (iii) from the most massive cloud cores.

The almost ubiquitous association of 6.7-GHz methanol masers with dust★

“…We considered that this might be the result of the limited latitude range of the MMB survey (i.e., |b| < 2 • ) and the deviation of these arms from the Galactic mid-plane to more negative values due to the Galactic warp. However, the Red MSX Source survey (Lumsden et al 2013), which covers a larger range in Galactic lat- Galactic distribution of all masers associated with submillimetre clumps. The ATLASGAL-MMB matches are shown by green filled circles while the blue and red filled circles show the results of the deep and shallow observations discussed in this paper.…”

“…We can test this by comparing the L mmb /M clump ratio for a sample of methanol masers known to be associated with some of the more evolved embedded stages. For this we use the sample of methanol masers found to be associated with MYSOs and UC H ii regions identified by the RMS survey (Lumsden et al 2013;Urquhart et al 2014c). To make sure that these associations are genuine, we require that the angular offset between the methanol maser and matched MYSO or H ii region is less than 2 ′′ and place a cut on the heliocentric distance of 10 kpc; these criteria ensure that the physical separation between the methanol maser and MYSO/H ii region is < 0.1 pc, the expected size of a protostellar core.…”

H2O maser emission associated with the planetary nebula IRAS 16333−4807

“…In fact, it was included in the Red MSX Source (RMS) survey (Lumsden et al 2013) as a candidate massive YSO, based on its MSX colours.…”

Radiation-hydrodynamical simulations of massive star formation using Monte Carlo radiative transfer – II. The formation of a 25 solar-mass star

“…Since we know that the model is meant to represent a MYSO it is worth testing whether our object would appear in the Red MSX Survey catalogue (Lumsden et al 2013), which collates data on a large number of MYSOs selected from the point source catalogue of the MSX satellite (Price et al 2001). In order to do this we constructed synthetic fluxes in the appropriate wavebands assuming a canonical distance of 1 kpc.…”

“…In order to do this we constructed synthetic fluxes in the appropriate wavebands assuming a canonical distance of 1 kpc. The cuts used by Lumsden et al (2013) are F21 > 2F8, F21 > F14, F14 > F8, F8 > 5FK and FK > 2FJ . (Note that since our model is still deeply embedded at the end of the simulation we neglect the last constraint.).…”