The Mass Distributions of Starless and Protostellar Cores in Gould Belt
  Clouds
  Using data from the SCUBA Legacy Catalogue (850 um) and Spitzer Space
Telescope (3.6 - 70 um), we explore dense cores in the Ophiuchus, Taurus,
Perseus, Serpens, and Orion molecular clouds. We develop a new method to
discriminate submillimeter cores found by SCUBA as starless or protostellar,
using point source photometry from Spitzer wide field surveys. First, we
identify infrared sources with red colors associated with embedded young
stellar objects (YSOs). Second, we compare the positions of these
YSO-candidates to our submillimeter cores. With these identifications, we
construct new, self-consistent starless and protostellar core mass functions
(CMFs) for the five clouds. We find best fit slopes to the high-mass end of the
CMFs of -1.26 +/- 0.20, -1.22 +/- 0.06, -0.95 +/- 0.20, and -1.67 +/- 0.72 for
Ophiuchus, Taurus, Perseus, and Orion, respectively. Broadly, these slopes are
each consistent with the -1.35 power-law slope of the Salpeter IMF at higher
masses, but suggest some differences. We examine a variety of trends between
these CMF shapes and their parent cloud properties, potentially finding a
correlation between the high-mass slope and core temperature. We also find a
trend between core mass and effective size, but we are very limited by
sensitivity. We make similar comparisons between core mass and size with visual
extinction (for A_V >= 3) and find no obvious trends. We also predict the
numbers and mass distributions of cores that future surveys with SCUBA-2 may
detect in each of these clouds.
