Masses of giant molecular clouds in Milky Way Virtual Observatory Resource

Authors
  1. Battisti A.J.
  2. Heyer M.H.
  3. Published by
    CDS
Abstract

The mass fraction of dense gas within giant molecular clouds (GMCs) of the Milky Way is investigated using ^13^CO data from the Five College Radio Astronomy Observatory Galactic Plane Surveys and the Bolocam Galactic Plane Survey (BGPS) of 1.1mm dust continuum emission. A sample of 860 compact dust sources are selected from the BGPS catalog and kinematically linked to 344 clouds of extended (>3') ^13^CO J=1-0 emission. Gas masses are tabulated for the full dust source and subregions within the dust sources with mass surface densities greater than 200M_{sun}_/pc^2^, which are assumed to be regions of enhanced volume density. Masses of the parent GMCs are calculated assuming optically thin ^13^CO J=1-0 emission and local thermodynamic equilibrium conditions. The mean fractional mass of dust sources to host GMC mass is 0.11^+0.12^_-0.06__. The high column density subregions comprise 0.07^+0.13^_-0.05_ of the mass of the cloud. Owing to our assumptions, these values are upper limits to the true mass fractions. The fractional mass of dense gas is independent of GMC mass and gas surface density. The low dense gas mass fraction suggests that the formation of dense structures within GMCs is the primary bottleneck for star formation. The distribution of velocity differences between the dense gas and the low density material along the line of sight is also examined. We find a strong, centrally peaked distribution centered on zero velocity displacement. This distribution of velocity differences is modeled with radially converging flows toward the dense gas position that are randomly oriented with respect to the observed line of sight. These models constrain the infall velocities to be 2-4km/s for various flow configurations.

Keywords
  1. milky-way-galaxy
  2. galaxy-planes
  3. interstellar-medium
  4. molecular-clouds
  5. galaxy-kinematics
Bibliographic source Bibcode
2014ApJ...780..173B
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https://cdsarc.cds.unistra.fr/viz-bin/cat/J/ApJ/780/173
IVOA Identifier IVOID
ivo://CDS.VizieR/J/ApJ/780/173
Document Object Identifer DOI
doi:10.26093/cds/vizier.17800173

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History

2015-07-21T15:56:00Z
Resource record created
2015-07-21T15:56:00Z
Created
2017-09-22T16:15:31Z
Updated

Contact

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CDS support team
Postal Address
CDS, Observatoire de Strasbourg, 11 rue de l'Universite, F-67000 Strasbourg, France
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