Mining the UKIDSS GPS: Star Formation and Embedded Clusters

The aim of this research is to develop methods to locate previously unknown stellar clusters from the UKIDSS Galactic Plane Survey catalogue data release 7. The cluster candidates were computationally searched from pre-filtered catalogue data using a recently proposed Method that fits a mixture model of Gaussian densities and background noise using the Expectation Maximization algorithm. The pre-filtering of the data involves both removing data artefacts and searching for sources classified as non-stellar due to associated surface brightness thus directing the search in particular to embedded stellar clusters. The findings were further screened by visual inspection of images, and SIMBAD was used to study sources in the direction of the candidates. The search covered an area of 1302 square degrees and 111 previously unknown cluster candidates and 19 previously unknown sites of star formation were located.