A Distributed Population of Low?Mass Pre?Main?Sequence Stars near the Taurus Molecular Clouds

We present a drift scan survey covering a ~5 deg by 50 deg region toward thesouthern portion of the Taurus-Auriga molecular cloud. Data taken in the B,R,Ifilters with the Quest-2 camera on the Palomar 48-inch telescope were combinedwith 2MASS near-infrared photometry to select candidate young stars. Follow-upoptical spectroscopy of 190 candidates led to identification of 42 new low masspre-main sequence stars with spectral types M4-M8, of which approximately halfexhibit surface gravity signatures similar to known Taurus stars while theother half exhibit surface gravity signatures similar to members of thesomewhat older Upper Sco, TW Hya and Beta Pic associations. The pre-mainsequence stars are spread over ~35 deg, and many are located well outside ofpreviously explored regions. From assessment of the spatial and proper motiondistributions, we argue that the new pre-main sequence stars identified farfrom the clouds cannot have originated from the vicinity of the 1-2 Myr-oldsubclusters which contain the bulk of the identified Taurus members, butinstead represent a newly-identified area of recent star-formation near theclouds.Comment: Accepted for publication in AJ. 13 pages including 9 figures (2 in color) and 1 table. A separate file tabA1.ps contains a hard copy of a second table which will be published in electronic form onl