Optical spectroscopy of Gaia detected protostars with DOT: Can we probe protostellar photospheres?

Abstract

Optical spectroscopy offers the most direct view of the stellar properties and the accretion indicators. Standard accretion tracers, such as H\(\beta \), H\(\alpha \) and Ca II triplet lines, and most photospheric features fall in the optical wavelengths. However, these tracers are not readily observable from deeply embedded protostars because of the large line of sight extinction (\(A_v \sim 50\)–100 mag) toward them. In some cases, however, it is possible to observe protostars at optical wavelengths if the outflow cavity is aligned along the line-of-sight that allows observations of the photosphere, or the envelope is very tenuous and thin, such that the extinction is low. In such cases, we not only detect these protostars at optical wavelengths, but also follow up spectroscopically. We have used the HOPS catalog (Furlan et al. in 2016) of protostars in Orion to search for optical counterparts for protostars in the Gaia DR3 survey. Out of the 330 protostars in the HOPS sample, an optical counterpart within 2\(''\) is detected for 62 of the protostars. For 17 out of 62 optically detected protostars, we obtained optical spectra (between 5500 and 8900 Å) using nt Object Spectrograph and Camera (ADFOSC) on the 3.6-m Devasthal Optical Telescope (DOT) and Hanle Faint Object Spectrograph Camera (HFOSC) on 2-m Himalayan Chandra Telescope (HCT). We detect strong photospheric features, such as the TiO bands in the spectra (of 4 protostars), hinting that photospheres can form early in the star-formation process. We further determined the spectral types of protostars, which show photospheres similar to a late M-type. Mass accretion rates derived for the protostars are similar to those found for T-Tauri stars, in the range of 10\(^{-7}\)–10\(^{-8}\) \(M_\odot \) yr\(^{-1}\).