GDL-CuTEx

Abstract

CuTEx tool was developed to analyse images in the infrared bands, in particular it was designed to resolve the problems met in the star forming region study. The star forming process can be studied in a wide interval of wavelengths between Near Infrared and Millimetre to investigate the different aspects of this phenomenon. In the most wavelengths, images of these regions present some problematics, due to the contributions of many objects to the global emission (more or less evolved stars, gas and dust at several temperatures, densities and distributions): • Crowding: we can say, on the basis of the actual scientific knowledge, that all the star form in clusters (Lada & Lada 2003; Faustini et al. 2009), and their richness is proportional to the mass of the highest mass star (Testi et al. 1997, 1998). • Highly spatially variable background: all star born in molecular clouds, so they are deep in gas and dust that are non-homogeneously distributed. • No-psf profile for all the sources: the protostars are embedded in their envelope during their accreting phase which no necessarily have a Gaussian or spherical-like density distribution. The source profile can changing depending on the stage of the accretion phase, becoming sigar-like from a spherical distribution CuTEx was designed and optimized to extract sources in these particular conditions. The code in originally written in IDL language and is exported in GDL language to use it as on-line tool. Nothing prevents the use of this routine in other bands or in scientific case different from the native case. A detail description of the method is provided in the A&A paper Molinari at al. (2011).