Comments on the paper The initial conditions of isolated star formation - VI. SCUBA mapping of prestellar cores (Kirk et al. 2005)

In their survey paper of prestellar cores with SCUBA, Kirk et al. (2005) have discarded two of our papers on L183 (Pagani et al. 2003, 2004). However these papers bring two important pieces of information that they cannot ignore. Namely, the real structure of L183 and the very poor correlation between submillimeter and far infrared (FIR) dust emission beyond Avb $approx$ 15 mag. Making the erroneous assumption that it is the same dust that we are seeing in emission at both 200 and 850 $mu$m, they derive constant temperatures which are only approximate, and column densities which are too low. In fact dust temperatures do decrease inside dark clouds and the FIR emission is only tracing the outer parts of the dark clouds (Pagani et al. 2004)