Massive protostellar candidates

This work represents the first step of the extension to the southern hemisphere of a project started more than a decade ago aimed at the identification of massive protostellar candidates. Following the same approach adopted for sources with DE>=-30{deg}, we have selected from the IRAS Point Source Catalogue 429 sources which potentially are compact molecular clouds on the basis of their IR colours.

The sample has then been divided into two groups according to the colour indices [25-12] and [60-12]: the 298 sources with [25-12]>=0.57 and [60-12]>=1.30 have been called High sources, the remaining 131 have been called Low sources. In this paper, we check the association with dense gas and dust in 130 Low sources. We have obtained a detection rate of ~85% in CS, demonstrating a tight association of the sources with dense molecular clumps.