A Parsec-Scale Catalog of Molecular Clouds in the Solar Neighborhood Based on 3D Dust Mapping: Implications for the Mass-Size Relation

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Hauptverfasser: Cahlon, Shlomo, Zucker, Catherine, Goodman, Alyssa, Lada, Charles, Alves, João
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2023
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author Cahlon, Shlomo
Zucker, Catherine
Goodman, Alyssa
Lada, Charles
Alves, João
author_facet Cahlon, Shlomo
Zucker, Catherine
Goodman, Alyssa
Lada, Charles
Alves, João
contents We dendrogram the Leike et al. 2020 3D dust map, leveraging its $\sim 1$ pc spatial resolution to produce a uniform catalog of molecular clouds in the solar neighborhood. Using accurate distances, we measure the properties of 65 clouds in true 3D space, eliminating much of the uncertainty in mass, size, and density. Clouds in the catalog contain a total of $1.1 \times 10^5 \; \rm M_{\odot}$, span distances of $116-440$ pc, and include a dozen well-studied clouds in the literature. In addition to deriving cloud properties in 3D volume density space, we create 2D dust extinction maps from the 3D data by projecting the 3D clouds onto a 2D "Sky" view. We measure the properties of the 2D clouds separately from the 3D clouds. We compare the scaling relation between the masses and sizes of clouds following Larson 1981. We find that our 2D projected mass-size relation, $M \propto r^{2.1}$, agrees with Larson's Third Relation, but our 3D derived properties lead to a scaling relation of about one order larger: $M \propto r^{2.9}$. Validating predictions from theory and numerical simulations, our results indicate that the mass-size relation is sensitive to whether column or volume density is used to define clouds, since mass scales with area in 2D ($M \propto r^{2}$) and with volume in 3D ($M \propto r^{3}$). Our results imply a roughly constant column and volume density in 2D and 3D, respectively, for molecular clouds, as would be expected for clouds where the lower density, larger volume-filling gas dominates the cloud mass budget.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2308_14794
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Parsec-Scale Catalog of Molecular Clouds in the Solar Neighborhood Based on 3D Dust Mapping: Implications for the Mass-Size Relation
Cahlon, Shlomo
Zucker, Catherine
Goodman, Alyssa
Lada, Charles
Alves, João
Astrophysics of Galaxies
We dendrogram the Leike et al. 2020 3D dust map, leveraging its $\sim 1$ pc spatial resolution to produce a uniform catalog of molecular clouds in the solar neighborhood. Using accurate distances, we measure the properties of 65 clouds in true 3D space, eliminating much of the uncertainty in mass, size, and density. Clouds in the catalog contain a total of $1.1 \times 10^5 \; \rm M_{\odot}$, span distances of $116-440$ pc, and include a dozen well-studied clouds in the literature. In addition to deriving cloud properties in 3D volume density space, we create 2D dust extinction maps from the 3D data by projecting the 3D clouds onto a 2D "Sky" view. We measure the properties of the 2D clouds separately from the 3D clouds. We compare the scaling relation between the masses and sizes of clouds following Larson 1981. We find that our 2D projected mass-size relation, $M \propto r^{2.1}$, agrees with Larson's Third Relation, but our 3D derived properties lead to a scaling relation of about one order larger: $M \propto r^{2.9}$. Validating predictions from theory and numerical simulations, our results indicate that the mass-size relation is sensitive to whether column or volume density is used to define clouds, since mass scales with area in 2D ($M \propto r^{2}$) and with volume in 3D ($M \propto r^{3}$). Our results imply a roughly constant column and volume density in 2D and 3D, respectively, for molecular clouds, as would be expected for clouds where the lower density, larger volume-filling gas dominates the cloud mass budget.
title A Parsec-Scale Catalog of Molecular Clouds in the Solar Neighborhood Based on 3D Dust Mapping: Implications for the Mass-Size Relation
topic Astrophysics of Galaxies
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.14794