Letter to the Editor

Predicted colors and flux densities of protostars in the Herschel PACS and SPIRE filters^*

B. Ali¹, J. J. Tobin², W. J. Fischer³, C. A. Poteet³, S. T. Megeath³, L. Allen⁴, L. Hartmann², N. Calvet², E. Furlan^5** and M. Osorio⁶

¹ NHSC/IPAC, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA USA e-mail: babar@ipac.caltech.edu
² University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan USA
³ University of Toledo, Toledo, OH USA
⁴ NOAO, Tucson, AZ USA
⁵ JPL, Caltech, Pasadena, CA, USA
⁶ Instituto de Astrofisica de Andalucia, Granada, Spain

Received: 31 March 2010
Accepted: 27 April 2010

Abstract

Upcoming surveys with the Herschel Space Observatory will yield far-IR photometry of large samples of young stellar objects, which will require careful interpretation. We investigate the color and luminosity diagnostics based on Herschel broad-band filters to identify and discern the properties of low-mass protostars. We compute a grid of 2016 protostars in various physical congurations, present the expected flux densities and flux density ratios for this grid of protostars, and compare Herschel observations of three protostars to the model results. These provide useful constraints on the range of colors and fluxes of protostar in the Herschel filters. We find that Herschel data alone is likely a useful diagnostic of the envelope properties of young stars.