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The Brick is not a brick: A comprehensive study of the structure and dynamics of the Central Molecular Zone cloud G0.253+0.016

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 نشر من قبل Jonathan Henshaw
 تاريخ النشر 2019
  مجال البحث فيزياء
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In this paper we provide a comprehensive description of the internal dynamics of G0.253+0.016 (a.k.a. the Brick); one of the most massive and dense molecular clouds in the Galaxy to lack signatures of widespread star formation. As a potential host to a future generation of high-mass stars, understanding largely quiescent molecular clouds like G0.253+0.016 is of critical importance. In this paper, we reanalyse Atacama Large Millimeter Array cycle 0 HNCO $J=4(0,4)-3(0,3)$ data at 3 mm, using two new pieces of software which we make available to the community. First, scousepy, a Python implementation of the spectral line fitting algorithm scouse. Secondly, acorns (Agglomerative Clustering for ORganising Nested Structures), a hierarchical n-dimensional clustering algorithm designed for use with discrete spectroscopic data. Together, these tools provide an unbiased measurement of the line of sight velocity dispersion in this cloud, $sigma_{v_{los}, {rm 1D}}=4.4pm2.1$ kms$^{-1}$, which is somewhat larger than predicted by velocity dispersion-size relations for the Central Molecular Zone (CMZ). The dispersion of centroid velocities in the plane of the sky are comparable, yielding $sigma_{v_{los}, {rm 1D}}/sigma_{v_{pos}, {rm 1D}}sim1.2pm0.3$. This isotropy may indicate that the line-of-sight extent of the cloud is approximately equivalent to that in the plane of the sky. Combining our kinematic decomposition with radiative transfer modelling we conclude that G0.253+0.016 is not a single, coherent, and centrally-condensed molecular cloud; the Brick is not a emph{brick}. Instead, G0.253+0.016 is a dynamically complex and hierarchically-structured molecular cloud whose morphology is consistent with the influence of the orbital dynamics and shear in the CMZ.



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133 - M. Zoccali , E. Valenti , F. Surot 2021
We analyse the near infrared colour magnitude diagram of a field including the giant molecular cloud G0.253+0.016 (a.k.a. The Brick) observed at high spatial resolution, with HAWK-I at the VLT. The distribution of red clump stars in a line of sight c rossing the cloud, compared with that in a direction just beside it, and not crossing it, allow us to measure the distance of the cloud from the Sun to be 7.20, with a statistical uncertainty of +/-0.16 and a systematic error of +/-0.20 kpc. This is significantly closer than what is generally assumed, i.e., that the cloud belongs to the near side of the central molecular zone, at 60 pc from the Galactic center. This assumption was based on dynamical models of the central molecular zone, observationally constrained uniquely by the radial velocity of this and other clouds. Determining the true position of the Brick cloud is relevant because this is the densest cloud of the Galaxy not showing any ongoing star formation. This puts the cloud off by 1 order of magnitude from the Kennicutt-Schmidt relation between the density of the dense gas and the star formation rate. Several explanations have been proposed for this absence of star formation, most of them based on the dynamical evolution of this and other clouds, within the Galactic center region. Our result emphasizes the need to include constraints coming from stellar observations in the interpretation of our Galaxy central molecular zone.
The Central Molecular Zone (CMZ; the central ~500 pc of the Milky Way) hosts molecular clouds in an extreme environment of strong shear, high gas pressure and density, and complex chemistry. G0.253+0.016, also known as `the Brick, is the densest, mos t compact and quiescent of these clouds. High-resolution observations with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) have revealed its complex, hierarchical structure. In this paper we compare the properties of recent hydrodynamical simulations of the Brick to those of the ALMA observations. To facilitate the comparison, we post-process the simulation and create synthetic ALMA maps of molecular line emission from eight molecules. We correlate the line emission maps to each other and to the mass column density, and find that HNCO is the best mass tracer of the eight emission lines. Additionally, we characterise the spatial structure of the observed and simulated cloud using the density probability distribution function (PDF), spatial power spectrum, fractal dimension, and moments of inertia. While we find good agreement between the observed and simulated data in terms of power spectra and fractal dimensions, there are key differences in terms of the density PDFs and moments of inertia, which we attribute to the omission of magnetic fields in the simulations. Models that include the external gravitational potential generated by the stars in the CMZ better reproduce the observed structure, highlighting that cloud structure in the CMZ results from the complex interplay between internal physics (turbulence, self-gravity, magnetic fields) and the impact of the extreme environment.
G0.253+0.016, aka the Brick, is one of the most massive (> 10^5 Msun) and dense (> 10^4 cm-3) molecular clouds in the Milky Ways Central Molecular Zone. Previous observations have detected tentative signs of active star formation, most notably a wate r maser that is associated with a dust continuum source. We present ALMA Band 6 observations with an angular resolution of 0.13 (1000 AU) towards this maser core, and report unambiguous evidence of active star formation within G0.253+0.016. We detect a population of eighteen continuum sources (median mass ~ 2 Msun), nine of which are driving bi-polar molecular outflows as seen via SiO (5-4) emission. At the location of the water maser, we find evidence for a protostellar binary/multiple with multi-directional outflow emission. Despite the high density of G0.253+0.016, we find no evidence for high-mass protostars in our ALMA field. The observed sources are instead consistent with a cluster of low-to-intermediate-mass protostars. However, the measured outflow properties are consistent with those expected for intermediate-to-high-mass star formation. We conclude that the sources are young and rapidly accreting, and may potentially form intermediate and high-mass stars in the future. The masses and projected spatial distribution of the cores are generally consistent with thermal fragmentation, suggesting that the large-scale turbulence and strong magnetic field in the cloud do not dominate on these scales, and that star formation on the scale of individual protostars is similar to that in Galactic disc environments.
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