Observation of 148 young stars toward NGC 1980

Recent studies by Bouy et al. and Pillitteri et al. have suggested that NGC1980 contains an older population of stars compared to a much younger ONC, and that it belongs to a foreground population that may be located in front of the Orion A molecular gas by as much as 40pc. In this work, we present low-resolution spectra toward 148 young stars found toward the NGC1980 region.

We determine the spectral types of these stars, examine accretion signatures and measure the extinction toward them. We determine that based on these observations, the age of the population of NGC1980 is indistinguishable from L1641, estimated to be ~3Myr, comparable with the study by Fang et al.