Near-Infrared Spectra of Chamaeleon I Stars

We present low resolution (R = 500) near-infrared spectra of 46 candidateyoung stellar objects in the Chamaeleon I star-forming region recently detectedin several deep photometric surveys of the cloud. Most of these stars have K <12. In addition, we present spectra of 63 previously known southern hemisphereyoung stars mainly belonging to the Chamaeleon I and Lupus dark clouds. Wedescribe near-infrared spectroscopic characteristics of these stars and use thewater vapor indexes to derive spectral types for the new objects. Photometricdata from the literature are used to estimate the bolometric luminosities ofall sources. We apply D'Antona & Mazzitelli (1998) pre-main sequenceevolutionary tracks and isocrones to derive masses and ages. We detect twoobjects with mass below the H burning limit among the 46 new candidates. One ofthis object (PMK99 IR Cha INa1) is the likely driving source of a bipolaroutflow in the northern region of the cloud.Comment: 48 pages, 9 figures, 9 tables, manuscript format - Accepted by Astron. J. (April 2003 issue)