Abstract
We report the discovery of four dusty cometary tails around low-mass stars in two young clusters belonging to the W5 star-forming region. Fits to the observed emission profiles from 24 μm observations with the Spitzer Space Telescope give tail lifetimes < 30 Myr, but more likely ≲ 5 Myr. This result suggests that the cometary phase is a short lived phenomenon, occurring after photoevaporation by a nearby O star has removed gas from the outer disk of a young low-mass star.
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