WISE-selected candidate SFRs beyond the Outer Arm

However, star-forming regions in the outer Galaxy have never been comprehensively studied or cataloged because of the difficulties in detecting them at such large distances. We studied 33 known young star-forming regions associated with 13 molecular clouds at R_G_>=13.5 kpc in the outer Galaxy with data from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mid-infrared all-sky survey (Wright et al. 2010AJ....140.1868W; Jarrett et al. 2011ApJ...735..112J).

From their color distribution, we developed a simple identification criterion of star-forming regions in the outer Galaxy with the WISE color. We applied the criterion to all the WISE sources in the molecular clouds in the outer Galaxy at R_G_>=13.5 kpc detected with the Five College Radio Astronomy Observatory (FCRAO) ^12^CO survey of the outer Galaxy (Heyer et al. 1998ApJS..115..241H), of which the survey region is 102.49{deg}=<l=<141.54{deg}, -3.03{deg}=<b=<5.41{deg}, and successfully identified 711 new candidate star-forming regions in 240 molecular clouds.