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Description
M17 is one of the youngest and most massive nearby star-formation regions in the Galaxy. It features a bright HII region erupting as a blister from the side of a giant molecular cloud (GMC). Combining photometry from the Spitzer Galactic Legacy Infrared Mid-Plane Survey Extraordinaire (GLIMPSE) with complementary infrared (IR) surveys, we identify candidate young stellar objects (YSOs) throughout a 1.5x1{deg} field that includes the M17 complex. The long sightline through the Galaxy behind M17 creates significant contamination in our YSO sample from unassociated sources with similar IR colors. Removing contaminants, we produce a highly reliable catalog of 96 candidate YSOs with a high probability of association with the M17 complex. We fit model spectral energy distributions to these sources and constrain their physical properties. Extrapolating the mass function of 62 intermediate-mass YSOs (M_*_>3M_{sun}_), we estimate that >1000 stars are in the process of forming in the extended outer regions of M17. The remaining 34 candidate YSOs are found in a 0.17deg^2^ field containing the well-studied M17 HII region and photodissociation region (PDR), where bright diffuse mid-IR emission drastically reduces the sensitivity of the GLIMPSE point-source detections.
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