Overview of the Massive Young Star-Forming Complex Study in Infrared and X-ray (MYStIX) project

The Massive Young Star-Forming Complex Study in Infrared and X-ray (MYStIX) seeks to characterize 20 OB-dominated young clusters and their environs at distances d ≤ 4 kpc using imaging detectors on the Chandra X-ray Observatory, Spitzer Space Telescope, and the United Kingdom InfraRed Telescope. The observational goals are to construct catalogs of star-forming complex stellar members with well-defined criteria and maps of nebular gas (particularly of hot X-ray-emitting plasma) and dust. A catalog of MYStIX Probable Complex Members with several hundred OB stars and 31,784 low-mass pre-main sequence stars is assembled. This sample and related data products will be used to seek new empirical constraints on theoretical models of cluster formation and dynamics, mass segregation, OB star formation, star formation triggering on the periphery of H II regions, and the survivability of protoplanetary disks in H II regions. This paper gives an introduction and overview of the project, covering the data analysis methodology and application to two star-forming regions: NGC 2264 and the Trifid Nebula. © 2013. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.We thank J. Forbrich and P. Teixeira (Univ. Vienna) for useful discussion about NGC 2264. The MYStIX project is supported at Penn State by NASA grant NNX09AC74G, NSF grant AST-0908038, and theChandra ACIS Team contract SV4- 74018 (PIs: G. Garmire & L. Townsley), issued by the Chandra X-ray Center, which is operated by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory for and on behalf of NASA under contract NAS8-03060. M. S. Povich was supported by an NSF Astronomy and Astrophysics Postdoctoral Fellowship under award AST-0901646. This research made use of data products from the Chandra Data Archive and the Spitzer Space Telescope, which is operated by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (California Institute of Technology) under a contract with NASA. The United Kingdom Infrared Telescope is operated by the Joint Astronomy Centre on behalf of the Science and Technology Facilities Council of the U.K. This work is based in part on data obtained as part of the UKIRT Infrared Deep Sky Survey and in part on data obtained in UKIRT Director’s Discretionary Time. This research used data products from the Two Micron All Sky Survey, which is a joint project of the University of Massachusetts and the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center/California Institute of Technology, funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the National Science Foundation. The HAWK-I near-infrared observations were collected with the High Acuity Wide-field K-band Imager instrument on the ESO 8 m Very Large Telescope at Paranal Observatory, Chile, under ESO programme 60.A-9284(K). This research has also made use of NASA’s Astrophysics Data System Bibliographic Services, the SIMBAD database operated at the Centre de Donnees ´ Astronomique de Strasbourg, and SAOImage DS9 software developed by Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory