Observing young stars through dust and time — Camila Órdenes-Huanca (Universidad de Concepción)

Young stellar objects are notoriously difficult to study. High extinction toward star-forming regions makes them inaccessible to optical surveys, and their intrinsic variability means that a snapshot observation captures only a fragment of their story. In this talk, I will argue that two things are essential for making progress in understanding them: observing in the near-infrared, and observing for a long time.
I will illustrate this with two lines of work, both enabled by the VISTA Variables in the Vía Láctea survey (VVV/VVVX) and its latest data release, VIRAC2. First, I will show how near-infrared photometry and proper motions from multi-epoch VVV/VVVX data can help us unveil the hidden stellar populations of massive young clusters in the Milky Way and understand their dynamical state. Second, I will explain how the long observational baseline of VVV/VVVX can reveal the dominant physical mechanism behind YSO brightness variations and, crucially, serve as a tool to distinguish true YSOs from the contaminants that populate large infrared catalogs. I will show how this variability-based approach improves the purity of YSO samples in ways that static photometry simply cannot.

Horarios: 8 Sep 2026

Publicado por: Gijs Mulders