The Nature of the Gould Belt from a Fractal Analysis of its Stellar Population.pdfVIP

The Astrophysical Journal: accepted THE NATURE OF THE GOULD BELT FROM A FRACTAL ANALYSIS OF ITS STELLAR POPULATION 7 0 N´estor S´anchez,1 Emilio J. Alfaro,1 Federico Elias,2 0 1 3 2 Antonio J. Delgado, and Jes´us Cabrera-Ca˜no g u A ABSTRACT 7 2 The Gould Belt (GB) is a system of gas and young, bright stars distributed ] h along a plane that is inclined with respect to the main plane of the Milky Way. p- Observational evidence suggests that the GB is our closest star formation com- o plex, but its true nature and origin remain rather controversial. In this work we r t analyze the fractal structure of the stellar component of the GB. In order to do s a this, we tailor and apply an algorithm that estimates the fractal dimension in a [ 1 precise and accurate way, avoiding both boundary and small data set problems. v We find that early OB stars (of spectral types earlier than B4) in the GB have 9 7 a fractal dimension very similar to that of the gas clouds in our Galaxy. On the 5 contrary, stars in the GB of later spectral types show a larger fractal dimension, 3 . similar to that found for OB stars of both age groups in the local Galactic disk 8 0 (LGD). This result seems to indicate that while the younger OB stars in the GB 7 preserve the memory of the spatial structure of the cloud where they were born, 0 : older stars are distributed following a similar morphology as that found for the v i LGD stars. The possible causes for these differences are discussed. X r a Subject headings: methods: nume