High altitude star formation and the superbubble connection

The thesis is a case study of “Carina Flare” (GSH 287+04–17) – a supershell with significant quantities of associated molecular gas. Since prior studies of the supershell provide substantial evidence of the Galactic Plane blowout, with the highest associated molecular cloud detected ~ 400 pc above the Galactic midplane, it serves as a perfect candidate to investigate the extent of star formation in a small sample of high-altitude clouds. We probe the selected molecular clouds lining the walls of this superstructure using the carbon monosulfide (J = 1 > 0) rotational transition as a tracer of dense gas clumps. Virial analysis of the detected dense clumps tentatively suggests that most of them maybe gravitationally bound and possess a significant potential to collapse to stellar cores. We use the classification scheme for young stellar objects (YSOs) devised by Koenig et al. (2014) combining WISE and 2MASS near and mid-infrared colors and magnitudes to locate YSOs associated with the molecular clouds and investigate their distribution with respect to CS clumps. The close association between the dense gas and YSOs provides substantial evidence in support of on-going star formation activity in the Carina Flare molecular clouds.