Stellar contents and star formation in the NGC 7538 region

Deep optical photometric data on the NGC 7538 region were collected and combined with archival data sets from the Chandra, 2MASS and Spitzer surveys to generate a new catalogue of young stellar objects (YSOs) including those not showing infrared excess emission. This new catalogue is complete down to 0.8 M_⊙. The nature of the YSOs associated with the NGC 7538 region and their spatial distribution are used to study the star-formation process and the resultant mass function (MF) in the region. Out of the 419 YSOs, ∼91 per cent have ages between 0.1 and 2.5 Myr and ∼86 per cent have masses between 0.5 and 3.5 M_⊙, as derived by the spectral energy distribution fitting analysis. Around 24, 62 and 2 per cent of these YSOs are classified to be class I, class II and class III sources, respectively. The X-ray activities for the class I, class II and class III objects are not significantly different from each other. This result implies that the enhanced X-ray surface flux due to the increase in the rotation rate may be compensated for by the decrease in the stellar surface area during the pre-main-sequence evolution. Our analysis shows that the O3V type high-mass star IRS 6 may have triggered the formation of young low-mass stars up to a radial distance of 3 pc. The MF shows a turn-off at around 1.5 M_⊙ and the value of its slope Γ in the mass range 1.5 < M/M_⊙ < 6 is -1.76 ± 0.24, which is steeper than the Salpeter value.