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Description
The low obscuration and proximity of the Carina nebula make it an ideal place to study the ongoing star formation process and impact of massive stars on low-mass stars in their surroundings. To investigate this process, we have generated a new catalogue of the pre-main-sequence (PMS) stars in the Carina west (CrW) region and studied their nature and spatial distribution. We have also determined various parameters (reddening, reddening law, age, mass) which are further used to estimate the initial mass function (IMF) and K-band luminosity function (KLF) for the region under study. We obtained deep UBVRI H{alpha} photometric data of the field situated to the west of the main Carina nebula and centered around WR22. Medium-resolution optical spectroscopy of a subsample of X-ray selected objects along with archival data sets from Chandra, XMM-Newton and 2MASS surveys are used for the present study. Our spectroscopic results indicate that the majority of the X-ray sources are late spectral type stars. The region shows a large amount of differential reddening with minimum and maximum values of E(B-V) as 0.25 and 1.1mag, respectively. Our analysis reveals that the total to selective absorption ratio R_V_ is ~3.7+/-0.1 suggesting an abnormal grain size in the observed region. We identify 467 young stellar objects (YSOs) and study their characteristics. The ages and masses of the 241 optically identified YSOs range from ~0.1 to 10Myr and ~0.3 to 4.8M_{sun}_, respectively. However, the majority of them are younger than 1Myr and have masses below 2M_{sun}_. The high mass star WR22 does not seem to have contributed to the formation of YSOs in the CrW region. The initial mass function slope, Gamma in this region is found to be -1.13+/-0.20 in the mass range of 0.5<M/M_{sun}_<4.8. The K-band luminosity function slope ({alpha}) is also estimated as 0.31+/-0.01. We also performed minimum spanning tree analysis of the YSOs in this region which reveals that there are at least ten YSO cores associated with the molecular cloud and that leads to an average core radius and median branch length 0.43pc and 0.28pc, respectively.
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