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A new distance to the Brick, the dense molecular cloud G0.253+0.016

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 نشر من قبل Manuela Zoccali
 تاريخ النشر 2021
  مجال البحث فيزياء
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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 crossing 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.



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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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