NIR properties of YSO in the CCCP

While the population of massive stars is rather well studied, the associated low-mass stellar population was largely unknown up to now. The near-infrared study in this paper builds on the results of the Chandra Carina Complex Project, that detected 14368 X-ray sources in the 1.4deg^2^ survey region, an automatic source classification study that classified 10714 of these X-ray sources as very likely young stars in Carina, and an analysis of the clustering properties of the X-ray-selected Carina members.

In order to determine physical properties of the X-ray-selected stars, most of which were previously unstudied, we used HAWK-I at the ESO Very Large Telescope to conduct a very deep near-IR survey with subarcsecond angular resolution, covering an area of about 1280arcmin^2^. The HAWK-I images reveal more than 600000 individual infrared sources, whereby objects as faint as J~23, H~22, and Ks~21 are detected at signal-to-noise ratio (S/N)>=3.