No Arabic abstract
We carried out an unbiased survey for massive dense cores in the giant molecular cloud associated with eta Carinae with the NANTEN telescope in 12CO, 13CO, and C18O 1-0 emission lines. We identified 15 C18O cores. Two of the 15 cores are associated with IRAS point sources whose luminosities are larger than 10^4 Lo, which indicates that massive star formation is occuring within these cores. Five cores including the two with IRAS sources are associated with MSX point sources. We detected H13CO+ (1-0) emission toward 4 C18O cores, one of which is associated with neither IRAS nor MSX point sources. This core shows the presence of a bipolar molecular outflow in 12CO (2-1), which indicates that star formation is also occuring in the core. In total, six C18O cores out of 15 are experienced star formation, and at least 2 of 15 are massive-star forming cores in the eta Car GMC. We found that massive star formation occurs preferentially in cores with larger column density, mass, number density, and smaller ratio of virial mass to LTE mass Mvir/M. We also found that the cores in the eta Car GMC are characterized by large line width and Mvir/M on average compared to the cores in other GMCs. We investigated the origin of a large amount of turbulence in the eta Car GMC. We propose the possibility that the large turbulence was pre-existing when the GMC was formed, and is now dissipating. Mechanisms such as multiple supernova explosions in the Carina flare supershell may have contributed to form a GMC with a large amount of turbulence.
Context The Vela Molecular Ridge is one of the nearest (700 pc) giant molecular cloud (GMC) complexes hosting intermediate-mass (up to early B, late O stars) star formation, and is located in the outer Galaxy, inside the Galactic plane. Vela C is one of the GMCs making up the Vela Molecular Ridge, and exhibits both sub-regions of robust and sub-regions of more quiescent star formation activity, with both low- and intermediate(high)-mass star formation in progress. Aims We aim to study the individual and global properties of dense dust cores in Vela C, and aim to search for spatial variations in these properties which could be related to different environmental properties and/or evolutionary stages in the various sub-regions of Vela C. Methods We mapped the submillimetre (345 GHz) emission from vela C with LABOCA (beam size 19.2, spatial resolution ~0.07 pc at 700 pc) at the APEX telescope. We used the clump-finding algorithm CuTEx to identify the compact submillimetre sources. We also used SIMBA (250 GHz) observations, and Herschel and WISE ancillary data. The association with WISE red sources allowed the protostellar and starless cores to be separated, whereas the Herschel dataset allowed the dust temperature to be derived for a fraction of cores. The protostellar and starless core mass functions (CMFs) were constructed following two different approaches, achieving a mass completeness limit of 3.7 Msun. Results We retrieved 549 submillimetre cores, 316 of which are starless and mostly gravitationally bound (therefore prestellar in nature). Both the protostellar and the starless CMFs are consistent with the shape of a Salpeter initial mass function in the high-mass part of the distribution. Clustering of cores at scales of 1--6 pc is also found, hinting at fractionation of magnetised, turbulent gas.
Similarity in shape between the initial mass function (IMF) and the core mass functions (CMFs) in star-forming regions prompts the idea that the IMF originates from the CMF through a self-similar core-to-star mass mapping process. To accurately determine the shape of the CMF, we create a sample of 8,431 cores with the dust continuum maps of the Cygnus X giant molecular cloud complex, and design a procedure for deriving the CMF considering the mass uncertainty, binning uncertainty, sample incompleteness, and the statistical errors. The resultant CMF coincides well with the IMF for core masses from a few $M_{odot}$ to the highest masses of 1300 $M_{odot}$ with a power-law of ${rm d}N/{rm d}Mpropto M^{-2.30pm0.04}$, but does not present an obvious flattened turnover in the low-mass range as the IMF does. More detailed inspection reveals that the slope of the CMF steepens with increasing mass. Given the numerous high-mass star-forming activities of Cygnus X, this is in stark contrast with the existing top-heavy CMFs found in high-mass star-forming clumps. We also find that the similarity between the IMF and the mass function of cloud structures is not unique at core scales, but can be seen for cloud structures of up to several pc scales. Finally, our SMA observations toward a subset of the cores do not present evidence for the self-similar mapping. The latter two results indicate that the shape of the IMF may not be directly inherited from the CMF.
We present 45-47 angular resolution maps at 50 sampling of the 12CO and 13CO J=1-0 emission toward a 1.39 deg x 1.33 deg region in the W51 HII region complex. These data permit the spatial and kinematic separation of several spectral features observed along the line of sight to W51, and establish the presence of a massive (1.2 x 10^6 Mo), large (83 pc x 114 pc) giant molecular cloud (GMC), defined as the W51 GMC, centered at (l,b,V) = (49.5 deg, -0.2 deg, 61 km/s). A second massive (1.9 x 10^5 Mo), elongated (136 pc x 22 pc) molecular cloud is found at velocities of about 68 km/s along the southern edge of the W51 GMC. Of the five radio continuum sources that classically define the W51 region, the brightest source at lambda 6cm (G49.5-0.4) is spatially and kinematically coincident with the W51 GMC and three (G48.9-0.3, G49.1-0.4, and G49.2-0.4) are associated with the 68 km/s cloud. Published absorption line spectra indicate that the fifth prominent continuum source (G49.4-0.3) is located behind the W51 molecular cloud. The W51 GMC is among the upper 1% of clouds in the Galactic disk by size and the upper 5-10% by mass. While the W51 GMC is larger and more massive than any nearby molecular cloud, the average H2 column density is not unusual given its size and the mean H2 volume density is comparable to that in nearby clouds. The W51 GMC is also similar to other clouds in that most of the molecular mass is contained in a diffuse envelope that is not currently forming massive stars. We speculate that much of the massive star formation activity in this region has resulted from a collision between the 68 km/s cloud and the W51 GMC.
Three bright molecular line sources in G333 have recently been shown to exhibit signatures of infall. We describe a molecular line radiative transfer modelling process which is required to extract the infall signature from Mopra and Nanten2 data. The observed line profiles differ greatly between individual sources but are reproduced well by variations upon a common unified model where the outflow viewing angle is the most significant difference between the sources. The models and data together suggest that the observed properties of the high-mass star-forming regions such as infall, turbulence, and mass are consistent with scaled-
We have mapped six molecular cloud cores in the Orion A giant molecular cloud (GMC), whose kinetic temperatures range from 10 to 30 K, in CCS and N2H+ with Nobeyama 45 m radio telescope to study their chemical characteristics. We identified 31 intensity peaks in the CCS and N2H+ emission in these molecular cloud cores. It is found for cores with temperatures lower than ~ 25 K that the column density ratio of N(N2H+)/N(CCS) is low toward starless core regions while it is high toward star-forming core regions, in case that we detected both of the CCS and N2H+ emission. This is very similar to the tendency found in dark clouds (kinetic temperature ~ 10 K). The criterion found in the Orion A GMC is N(N2H+)/N(CCS) ~ 2-3. In some cases, the CCS emission is detected toward protostars as well as the N2H+ emission. Secondary late-stage CCS peak in the chemical evolution caused by CO depletion may be a possible explanation for this. We found that the chemical variation of CCS and N2H+ can also be used as a tracer of evolution in warm (10-25 K) GMC cores. On the other hand, some protostars do not accompany N2H+ intensity peaks but are associated with dust continuum emitting regions, suggesting that the N2H+ abundance might be decreased due to CO evaporation in warmer star-forming sites.