Star Forming Regions in Cassiopeia.pdf

Handbook of Star Forming Regions Vol. I Astronomical Society of the Pacific, 2008 Bo Reipurth, ed. Star Forming Regions in Cassiopeia Ma?ria Kun Konkoly Observatory, H-1525 Budapest, P.O. Box 67, Hungary Abstract. This chapter describes the Galactic star forming regions in the constella- tion Cassiopeia, in the Galactic coordinate range 120? ～ l ～ 130 ? , ?5? ～ b ～ 15 ? . At |b| 10? the nearby clouds L 1333 and L 1340 are found in this region. The local arm of the Galaxy in Cassiopeia contains only a few star forming regions, smaller and less active than the OB associations of the neighboring Cepheus. Five members of this sys- tem, LkHα 198 and its environment, L 1287, L 1293, L 1302/NGC 255, and S 187 are discussed. Several more distant OB associations and giant star forming regions in Cas- siopeia are associated with the Perseus arm at 2.0–3.0 kpc. Among these, the Herbig Be star MWC 1080 is discussed in this chapter. 1. Overview The large-scale distribution of the dark clouds in Cassiopeia, adopted from the Atlas and Catalog of Dark Clouds (Dobashi et al. 2005), is displayed in Fig. 1. The most prominent clouds and young stellar objects are marked. The high Galactic latitude region of the constellation Cassiopeia contains a few nearby star forming molecular clouds. The nearest cloud is Lynds 1333 at (l, b)=(129?, +15 ? ) and at d ≈ 180 pc, associated with a few low-mass pre-main sequence stars. Lynds 1340, a region of intermediate and low mass star formation, can be found at (l, b)=(130?,+11.?5) at d ≈ 600 pc. Towards lower latitudes, the cloud complex L 1355/L 1358 is located at (l, b) ～ (133.?5,+8.?6). This complex is illuminated by a loose group of B and A stars and the classical Cepheid SU Cas (Turner Evans 1984). The average distance of these stars, determined by Turner Evans (1984) is d = 258 ± 3 pc. No star formation has been observed in these clouds. The starless cores of L 1355 and L 1358 have been targets of several studies aimed at observing ini- ti