The JCMT Gould Belt Survey: A First Look at the Auriga-California
  Molecular Cloud with SCUBA-2
  We present 850 and 450 micron observations of the dense regions within the
Auriga-California molecular cloud using SCUBA-2 as part of the JCMT Gould Belt
Legacy Survey to identify candidate protostellar objects, measure the masses of
their circumstellar material (disk and envelope), and compare the star
formation to that in the Orion A molecular cloud. We identify 59 candidate
protostars based on the presence of compact submillimeter emission,
complementing these observations with existing Herschel/SPIRE maps. Of our
candidate protostars, 24 are associated with young stellar objects (YSOs) in
the Spitzer and Herschel/PACS catalogs of 166 and 60 YSOs, respectively (177
unique), confirming their protostellar nature. The remaining 35 candidate
protostars are in regions, particularly around LkHalpha 101, where the
background cloud emission is too bright to verify or rule out the presence of
the compact 70 micron emission that is expected for a protostellar source. We
keep these candidate protostars in our sample but note that they may indeed be
prestellar in nature. Our observations are sensitive to the high end of the
mass distribution in Auriga-Cal. We find that the disparity between the
richness of infrared star forming objects in Orion A and the sparsity in
Auriga-Cal extends to the submillimeter, suggesting that the relative star
formation rates have not varied over the Class II lifetime and that Auriga-Cal
will maintain a lower star formation efficiency.
