Milky Way molecular clouds from ^12^CO Virtual Observatory Resource

Authors
  1. Miville-Deschenes M.-A.
  2. Murray N.
  3. Lee E.J.
  4. Published by
    CDS
Abstract

This study presents a catalog of 8107 molecular clouds that covers the entire Galactic plane and includes 98% of the ^12^CO emission observed within b+/-5^{deg}^. The catalog was produced using a hierarchical cluster identification method applied to the result of a Gaussian decomposition of the Dame+ (2001ApJ...547..792D) data. The total H_2_ mass in the catalog is 1.2x10^9^M_{sun}_, in agreement with previous estimates. We find that 30% of the sight lines intersect only a single cloud, with another 25% intersecting only two clouds. The most probable cloud size is R~30pc. We find that M{propto}R^2.2+/-0.2^, with no correlation between the cloud surface density, {Sigma}, and R. In contrast with the general idea, we find a rather large range of values of {Sigma}, from 2 to 300M_{sun}_/pc^2^, and a systematic decrease with increasing Galactic radius, R_gal_. The cloud velocity dispersion and the normalization {sigma}_0_={sigma}_v_/R^1/2^ both decrease systematically with R_gal_. When studied over the whole Galactic disk, there is a large dispersion in the line width-size relation and a significantly better correlation between {sigma}_v_ and {Sigma}R. The normalization of this correlation is constant to better than a factor of two for R_gal_<20kpc. This relation is used to disentangle the ambiguity between near and far kinematic distances. We report a strong variation of the turbulent energy injection rate. In the outer Galaxy it may be maintained by accretion through the disk and/or onto the clouds, but neither source can drive the 100 times higher cloud-averaged injection rate in the inner Galaxy.

Keywords
  1. molecular-clouds
  2. co-line-emission
  3. galaxy-planes
  4. milky-way-galaxy
  5. interstellar-medium
Bibliographic source Bibcode
2017ApJ...834...57M
See also HTML
https://cdsarc.cds.unistra.fr/viz-bin/cat/J/ApJ/834/57
IVOA Identifier IVOID
ivo://CDS.VizieR/J/ApJ/834/57
Document Object Identifer DOI
doi:10.26093/cds/vizier.18340057

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http://vizieridia.saao.ac.za/viz-bin/VizieR-2?-source=J/ApJ/834/57
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History

2017-06-12T09:39:22Z
Resource record created
2017-06-12T09:39:22Z
Created
2019-06-05T12:45:13Z
Updated

Contact

Name
CDS support team
Postal Address
CDS, Observatoire de Strasbourg, 11 rue de l'Universite, F-67000 Strasbourg, France
E-Mail
cds-question@unistra.fr