Research Note

Reddening behaviors of young stellar objects in Spitzer/IRAC bands

¹ School of Space Research, Kyung Hee University, Yongin, Gyeonggi 446-701, Korea
e-mail: cksim@khu.ac.kr
² Dept. of Astronomy & Space Science, Kyung Hee University, Yongin, Gyeonggi 446-701, Korea

Received: 26 April 2013
Accepted: 11 June 2013

Abstract

We investigate the reddening behaviors of young stellar objects (YSOs) in the photometric system of the InfraRed Array Camera (IRAC) onboard the Spitzer Space Telescope. We constructed a couple of model extinction laws for the IRAC wavelength range that are composed of a power-law function and a 9.7  μm absorption bump by silicates. We then calculated reddened colors of the YSOs in 3 different evolutionary stages with various masses and disk inclinations by convolving the adopted model spectral energy distributions (SEDs) with the spectral response functions of the IRAC bands for K_S-band extinction values of up to 8 mag. We find that the reddening vectors of YSOs in the [3.6]−[4.5] vs. [5.8]−[8.0] diagrams are considerably SED-dependent and can be highly nonlinear in some cases. Many YSOs show a “bluening” (as opposed to the reddening) in the [5.8]−[8.0] color owing to the 9.7  μm bump in the extinction law. Our findings imply that dereddening in a color–color or color–magnitude diagram involving the [8.0] band might be highly unreliable unless the SED of the source and the extinction law are at least approximately known.