C2D High Reliability CLOUDS Catalog: Spitzer Observations of Star-Forming Regions

The C2D High Reliability CLOUDS Catalog provides a reliable list of sources from the Spitzer Legacy Program's observations of five nearby molecular clouds. It includes candidate protostars and substellar objects as faint as 0.001 solar luminosities, observed with IRAC and MIPS instruments. The data was produced by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and was last updated in March 2026.

Use Cases

• Identify candidate protostars and substellar objects based on infrared detections across multiple bands.
• Study the evolution of circumstellar dust, the raw material for planetary cores, in systems up to about 10 Myr old.
• Compare star-forming environments across five large molecular clouds: Chamaeleon II, Lupus, Ophiuchus, Perseus, and Serpens.
• Analyze the correlation between cloud mass, stellar mass, and the properties of newly formed objects.

Strengths

• Derived from the Spitzer Legacy Program using all three Spitzer instruments (IRAC, MIPS, and IRS).
• Focuses on high-reliability sources requiring good signal-to-noise detection in some bands.
• Surveys five of the nearest large molecular clouds, encompassing a wide range of environments.
• Targets about 190 systems likely to be in early stages of planetary system formation.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment for large-scale statistical analysis.
• Data may reflect observational bias inherent to the specific Spitzer instruments and targeted fields.

Provenance

Source

National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Collection Method

Observations from the Spitzer Space Telescope's IRAC, MIPS, and IRS instruments as part of the Cores to Disks (C2D) Legacy Program.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-03-13 16:58:54.655288; freshness should be verified.

Geography

Observations of five molecular clouds: Chamaeleon II, Lupus, Ophiuchus, Perseus, and Serpens.