The Luminosities of Protostars in the Spitzer c2d and Gould Belt Legacy
  Clouds
  Motivated by the long-standing "luminosity problem" in low-mass star
formation whereby protostars are underluminous compared to theoretical
expectations, we identify 230 protostars in 18 molecular clouds observed by two
Spitzer Space Telescope Legacy surveys of nearby star-forming regions. We
compile complete spectral energy distributions, calculate Lbol for each source,
and study the protostellar luminosity distribution. This distribution extends
over three orders of magnitude, from 0.01 Lsun - 69 Lsun, and has a mean and
median of 4.3 Lsun and 1.3 Lsun, respectively. The distributions are very
similar for Class 0 and Class I sources except for an excess of low luminosity
(Lbol < 0.5 Lsun) Class I sources compared to Class 0. 100 out of the 230
protostars (43%) lack any available data in the far-infrared and submillimeter
(70 um < wavelength < 850 um) and have Lbol underestimated by factors of 2.5 on
average, and up to factors of 8-10 in extreme cases. Correcting these
underestimates for each source individually once additional data becomes
available will likely increase both the mean and median of the sample by 35% -
40%. We discuss and compare our results to several recent theoretical studies
of protostellar luminosities and show that our new results do not invalidate
the conclusions of any of these studies. As these studies demonstrate that
there is more than one plausible accretion scenario that can match
observations, future attention is clearly needed. The better statistics
provided by our increased dataset should aid such future work.
