Characterizing Massive Protostars in the Galactic Center

Massive stars are important throughout the universe, however the mechanisms and conditions of their formation remain poorly understood. Here we explore the massive protostellar population in the extreme environment of our Galaxy's central regions to determine their intrinsic properties and thus test theoretical models of their formation. We construct and fit spectral energy distributions (SEDs) of the population using archival infrared imaging data from SOFIA-FORCAST (Hankins et al. 2020), as well as from Spitzer and Herschel. We identified 200 compact sources from the SOFIA 25 and 37 μm images using the CuTEx source detection algorithm. Combined with 490 compact 70 μm sources identified by the Hi-GAL survey (Molinari et al. 2016), we constructed a sample of 690 sources. About 10% of these infrared compact sources have corresponding sub-mm compact sources identified by CMZoom survey (Hatchfield et al., 2020), a subset which we identify to be more likely to be true massive protostars. We utilize an algorithm to automatically determine aperture photometry for each source in crowded regions (Telkamp et al. in prep.). SED fitting is made using sedcreator (Fedriani et al. 2022) to derive protostellar properties based on the Turbulent Core Accretion (TCA) model (McKee & Tan 2003; Zhang & Tan 2018). This SED fitting provides estimates of various properties, including initial core mass, clump environment mass surface density and current protostellar mass. We present the protostellar mass and luminosity functions, and then use these to derive star formation rates and efficiencies for particular clouds Sagittarius B2, Sagittarius C, and 50 kms-1, as well as the global Galactic center region.